Abstract
In this article, we add research on technical integration and dependency to the theories of platformization. Our research seeks to understand how platforms have been able to technically integrate themselves into the fabric of the mobile ecosystem, transforming the economic dynamics that allow these largely enclosed entities to compete. We therefore want to consider platforms as service assemblages to account for the material ways in which they have decomposed and recomposed themselves for developers, enabling them to shift the economic dynamics of competition and monopolization in their favor. This article will argue that this shift in the formation of platform monopolies is being brought about by the decentralization of these services, leading to an overall technical integration of the largest digital platform such as Facebook and Google into the source code of almost all apps. We present new digital methodologies to surface these relations and material conditions of platforms. These methodologies offer us a whole new toolkit to investigate how decentralized services depend on each other and how new power relations are formed.
Highlights
Platforms can no longer be understood as single monolithic applications
We want to consider platforms as service assemblages to account for the material ways in which they have decomposed and recomposed themselves, enabling them to shift the economic dynamics of competition and monopolization in their favor
If we rank how two software development kits (SDKs) collections appear together according to their frequency, we find the first combinations wherein neither Google nor Facebook are included at ranks 47 and 64
Summary
Platforms can no longer be understood as single monolithic applications. For Aradau et al (2019), the digital materiality of platforms is foregrounded in the process wherein they are broken apart into services and reassembled into new products. Nieborg and Poell (2018) add to this discussion with their concept of “platform dependence,” drawing attention to the symbiotic relationship between the content of producers and platforms and, more importantly, to the ways in which these digital infrastructures have made themselves integral to industries that once existed outside their grasp For this reason, as we shall see, large digital advertising platforms have diversified their in-house development expertise and begun offering services at scale across the mobile ecosystem. These are not anonymous third parties, passively gathering data from our apps, but known services provided by platforms that create new conditions of economic growth and dependency, which expand every time one of these gets integrated into an app As a result, these platforms maximize data flows and service interactions at a microscopic, infrastructural level of technical integration which makes the entire mobile digital ecosystem complicit in this endless value-added exchange. With random walks and association analysis in the section “Multiplicities of Services,” we go beyond how two services co-occur and discover service multiplicities as well as which new services are emerging out of the shadows of the already dominating ones
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
