Third-party Developers Research Articles

What interests do intermediaries prioritize during wind- and solar project development?

A transition towards a low-carbon energy system requires the large-scale diffusion of renewable electricity (RE) technologies. Intermediary actors, such as installers, project developers or consultants, can facilitate this process by supporting RE adopters. Recent studies have also pointed out that there are potential drawbacks associated with intermediary support. Acting as filters and gatekeepers, intermediaries have the complex mission to prioritize between various stakeholder interests, including their own profit maximization. The aim of this research is to understand what stakeholder interests intermediaries prioritize when developing RE projects. Results of a choice experiment with third-party developers in Sweden highlight differences between technologies: wind developers prioritize electricity output, while solar developers prioritize client satisfaction. Despite being for-profit organizations, intermediaries did not prioritize their own interests over the interests of their clients. Solar PV developers prioritize client satisfaction over maximization of electricity output, which may have negative implications for the efficiency of the projects.

Platform politics: Software as strategy in Apple’s platform ecosystem

In the past 10 years platform ecosystems have come to play a significant role in many aspects of human societies, bringing with them certain logics and practices that structure how people live and work. Operating such a platform ecosystem gives rise to certain strategies for creating and managing a distributed labor force that is not directly controlled by the platform owner. This paper explores some of those strategies by investigating Swift, a programming language created by Apple to facilitate third-party software development for its platform ecosystem. Through the story of its emergence and evolution I show how Apple wields Swift as a managerial tool and as a competitive weapon to maintain the generative potential of its platform ecosystem and to evolve it in profitable ways. In so doing this paper foregrounds the internal dynamics of software platforms and helps us better understand some of the politics at play in the constitution of everyday technologies.

Evaluating Processes to Certify Mobile Applications During Developer Relations Activities

In a Mobile Software Ecosystem (MSECO), the software organizations have opened up their structures to third-party developers aiming to reach goals to ensure the MSECO is working properly, such as increasing number of users, mobile applications (apps) and developers. Thus, the management organization (keystone) by their Developer Relations (DevRel) teams must restructure its processes to support third-party developers and create ways to attract the development of apps. The development of apps during events planned and conducted by DevRel team (e.g., hackathons or developer conferences) requires an approach that allows developers to achieve the expected performance into the MSECO. However, there is a quality contribution barrier, the App Store, the App Store’s criteria do not guarantee that apps certified by these criteria have good performance in number of downloads and positive reviews into the MSECO. Aims: We present an evaluation of a mobile certification approach for the MSECO context, called MSECO-CERT (Mobile Software ECOsystem app CERTification), in terms of mobile application downloads, ratings and changes in developers’ attitudes. MSECO-CERT comprises support (MSECO-SUP) and development (MSECO-DEV) processes. We describe two empirical studies: feasibility and observational. MSECO-CERT produced a growth coefficient of downloads (363%) and average user ratings (28%) when compared to an ad hoc approach. We observed that the DevRel practitioners (i.e., developer evangelists) and most of the developers (70%) considered MSECO-SUP and MSECO-DEV processes easy to use. They indicate that they would use both processes in the future. The results indicate that a keystone needs to invest in the analysis of their certification processes considering the ecosystem elements and also create mechanisms that allow monitoring the effect of DevRel activities. Our studies also helped to evolve MSECO-CERT by refining roles, activities and artifacts.

Платформа автоматического фаззинга программного интерфейса приложений

Randomized testing (fuzzing) is a well-known approach for finding bugs in programs. Fuzzing is typically performed during the finishing stage of quality assurance in order to check the stability of the target program in the face of malformed or unexpected input data. Modern software more than often provides an API for extending its functionality by third-party developers; since an API is an entry point to software internals, its functionality and usage scenarios must be tested as well. Thorough API testing must involve checking a large number of possible scenarios and it is fairly obvious that fuzzing can be applied to this task by generating usage scenarios in an automatic randomized way—which brings us to the concept of API fuzzing. In this paper we describe an automatic approach to randomized testing of API libraries for Android/desktop Java. Proposed method is able to change the sequence of called API functions in order to discover new execution paths. It consists of two basic stages. In the first stage the arguments of currently called API functions are mutated. When mutation of called API functions arguments can’t find new execution path the tool switches to the second stage. In the second stage current sequence of API functions calls is mutated. Mutation can add new API functions calls or remove some of them. After API calls sequence mutation, the tool switches back to the first stage. Switches between the first and the second stages are continued during whole process of fuzzing. During the experimental setup developed method of randomized testing were able to find 15 crashes in SmartThings application developed by Samsung.

АНАЛІЗ ВПЛИВУ РОЗВИТКУ FINTECH НА ПРЯМІ ІНОЗЕМНІ ІНВЕСТИЦІЇ

The article looks over the degree of implementation of FinTech services in the world. It’s determined that the leading countries in the implementation of FinTech are China, India, and South Africa. Crucial influencing factor is demographic, rather than the widespread demand among the population for modern technology. The penetration rate of these services in the United States, where the largest technology companies in the world are located, was only 46%. The share of service users among the population that actively use digital technologies reaches 33%. Noted that the objects of investment of American banks are startups, programming applications of open interfaces and platforms for third-party developers. European banks also aim to invest actively in the development of FinTech but are still more focus on their own development. It is determined that Asian, Australian and African banks tend to develop technological solutions on their own. According to experts, the number of partnership agreements in the world with FinTech companies will increase each year. The analysis of the regional structure of global investments in FinTech carried out. It showed a positive dynamics of investment during 2014–2019. Increasing the size of global investments is due to the interest of investors in new projects and business models. Venture capital investment priorities coincide with global ones and are related to reviewing, updating, and improving business processes. The amount of venture capital invested in FinTech projects stimulates the development of the financial industry, mainly in China, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Ireland. They account for almost 9 times more investment in FinTech than in other countries. Correlation-regression analysis was applied to investigate the relationship between the level of development of the FinTech market and foreign direct investments. According to the results of calculations, the largest impact on foreign direct investment has the volume of venture investment in FinTech-projects and the FinTech market development rating. This proves the positive impact of FinTech companies on the growth of foreign investments in the country.

PGFit: Static permission analysis of health and fitness apps in IoT programming frameworks

Popular Internet of Things (IoT) programming frameworks, such as Google Fit, enable third-party developers to build apps that store and retrieve user data from a variety of data sources such as wearable devices. Most of these apps, particularly those that are health and fitness-related, collect potentially sensitive personal data and send it to cloud servers. Analogous to Android OS, IoT programming frameworks often follow similar permission model; third-party apps on IoT platforms prompt users to grant the apps the access to their private data stored on cloud servers of IoT programming frameworks. Most users have a poor understanding of why these permissions are being asked. This can often lead to unnecessary permissions being granted, which in turn grant these apps with excessive privileges. Over-privileged apps might not be harmful to users when they are used as designed, however, they can potentially be exploited by a malicious actor in a cyber security attack. This is of particular concern with health and fitness apps, which may be exploited to leak highly sensitive personal information. This paper presents PGFit, a static permission analysis tool that precisely and efficiently identifies privilege escalation in third-party apps built on top of a popular IoT programming framework, Google Fit. PGFit extracts the set of requested permission scopes and the set of used data types in Google Fit-enabled apps to determine whether the requested permission scopes are actually necessary. PGFit performs graph reachability analysis on inter-procedural control flow graph. PGFit serves as a quality assurance tool for developers and a privacy checker for app users. We evaluated PGFit using a set of 20 popular Google Fit-enabled apps downloaded from Google Play. Our tool successfully identified the unnecessary permission scopes granted in our data set apps and found that 6 (30%) of the 20 apps are over-privileged.

The Advent of the Internet of Things in Airfield Lightning Systems: Paving the Way from a Legacy Environment to an Open World.

This paper discusses the design and prototype implementation of a software solution facilitating the interaction of third-party developers with a legacy monitoring and control system in the airfield environment. By following the Internet of Things (IoT) approach and adopting open standards and paradigms such as REpresentational State Transfer (REST) and Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) for message dispatching, the work aims at paving the way towards a more open world in the airfield industrial sector. The paper also presents performance results achieved by extending legacy components to support IoT standards. Quantitative results not only demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed solution, but also its suitability in terms of prompt message dispatching and increased fault tolerance.

Why do they ask? An exploratory study of crowd discussions about Android application programming interface in stack overflow

Nowadays, more and more Android developers prefer to seek help from Q&A website like Stack Overflow, despite the rich official documentation. Several researches have studied the limitations of the official application programming interface (API) documentations and proposed approaches to improve them. However, few of them digged into the requirements of the third-party developers to study this. In this work, we gain insight into this question from multidimensional perspectives of API developers and API users by a kind of cross-validation. We propose a hybrid approach, which combines manual inspection on artifacts and online survey on corresponding developers, to explore the different focus between these two types of stakeholders. In our work, we manually inspect 1000 posts and receive 319 questionnaires in total. Through the mutual verification of the inspection and survey process, we found that the users are more concerned with the usage of API, while the official documentation mainly provides functional description. Furthermore, we identified 9 flaws of the official documentation and summarized 12 aspects (from the content to the representation) for promotion to improve the official API documentations.

Visual Programming Tools for Creating Video Effects

Visual programming is a technology that allows you to create program code using graphic elements, not text. Graphic elements are used to describe the logic of the program. Visual programming provides the opportunity to describe processes in an easy to understand representation and sufficient level of abstraction. The paper considers the potential of using visual programming in visual arts. The software / Max / MSP / Jitter was considered.Max, also known as Max / MSP / Jitter, is a visual programming environment for music and multimedia developed and supported by Cycling '74 based in San Francisco. Max is a visual programming environment; MSP is an extension that makes it possible to work with audio, and Jitter is an extension for working with video. Hence the name is Max / MSP / Jitter. Max is a great space for creativity and requires minimal programming experience. It is an environment that contains a set of tools for creating unique sounds, beautiful rendering and exciting interactive media. These tools (called "objects") are small programs that perform specific functions. Some generate noise, others process video, some just perform arithmetic operations.Max, as a rule, is studied by compiling a dictionary of objects and how they function in Patchwork. Most objects are not graphical, consisting only of the object name and several attribute arguments (in essence, class properties), entered in the object field, other objects are graphical, including sliders, numeric fields, dials, table editor, drop-down menus, buttons and other objects for interactive program launch. Max / MSP / Jitter comes with about 600 such objects as a standard package; Extensions can be written by third-party developers like Max patchers (for example, by encapsulating some patcher functions in a sub-program that itself is a Max patch), or as objects written in C, C ++, Java, or JavaScript.Max interacts with OSC, MIDI, and HTTP, among many other protocols, and can handle input from external devices, such as Arduino (Arduino IDE is a development programming environment that is designed to program the same name card. Today, Arduino designs all kinds of interactive , educational, experimental, entertaining models and devices) through the setting of the serial input. It makes Max a great tool for working with visual art, a form that often uses existing video as a source material and offers many applications — interactive installations, light shows, trans-spatial design (visual projection mapping) and concert visual effects.Ref. 10, fig. 4.

How Platform Governance Changes when Customers Become Developers

Platform ecosystems in the software industry are considered to have two sides: third-party developers that provide applications and customers that use these applications. However, in many platform ...

From Chicken-or-Egg to Platform Ecosystem: Mobilizing Complementors by Creating Social Foci

Firms frequently rely on an ecosystem of complementary goods and services to create and capture value from innovation. However, strategies for cultivating nascent ecosystems have received limited attention. In particular, firms building platform-based ecosystems must address the quintessential “chicken-or-the-egg” problem to jumpstart the virtuous cycle of network effects underlying platform competitive advantage. While prior work focuses on economic approaches to building an ecosystem (e.g., complementor subsidies), we highlight the social and organizational mechanisms by which platform owners cultivate relationships with potential complementors. Platform owners can generate momentum around their platform by creating social foci. As forums for face-to-face interactions, social foci orient potential complementors towards the platform and towards one another. We explore the consequences of platform owners sponsoring “hackathon” software development events, an example of social foci being used as a channel for platform evangelism. We construct a novel dataset of 1,302 software developers participating in 167 hackathons supported by a set of 30 separate platforms. Our longitudinal analysis of the codebase of third-party application developers finds that attending a platform-sponsored hackathon increases the developer’s rate of adoption and usage of the platform. Consistent with prior literature, we find monetary subsidies encourage platform adoption. Extending prior work, we theorize and find support for social mechanisms affecting platform adoption. Hackathons appear to act as forums for social learning, tacit knowledge transfer, and socially-induced shifts in expectations over a platform’s future network size, which are associated with a heightened likelihood that a software developer adopts a platform.

A verification-driven framework for iterative design of controllers

Controllers often are large and complex reactive software systems and thus they typically cannot be developed as monolithic products. Instead, they are usually comprised of multiple components that interact to provide the desired functionality. Components themselves can be complex and in turn be decomposed into multiple sub-components. Designing such systems is complicated and must follow systematic approaches, based on recursive decomposition strategies that yield a modular structure. This paper proposes FIDDle–a comprehensive verification-driven framework which provides support for designers during development. FIDDle supports hierarchical decomposition of components into sub-components through formal specification in terms of pre- and post-conditions as well as independent development, reuse and verification of sub-components. The framework allows the development of an initial, partially specified design of the controller, in which certain components, yet to be defined, are precisely identified. These components can be associated with pre- and post-conditions, i.e., a contract, that can be distributed to third-party developers. The framework ensures that if the components are compliant with their contracts, they can be safely integrated into the initial partial design without additional rework. As a result, FIDDle supports an iterative design process and guarantees correctness of the system at any step of development. We evaluated the effectiveness of FIDDle in supporting an iterative and incremental development of components using the K9 Mars Rover example developed at NASA Ames. This can be considered as an initial, yet substantive, validation of the approach in a realistic setting. We also assessed the scalability of FIDDle by comparing its efficiency with the classical model checkers implemented within the LTSA toolset. Results show that FIDDle scales as well as classical model checking as the number of the states of the components under development and their environments grow.

T-REST: An Open-Enabled Architectural Style for the Internet of Things

Computing offloading is a key challenge of new rising computing paradigms of the Internet of Things (IoT) like edge computing, which shifts computations to data sources as near as possible to gain the benefits, such as low latency and energy efficiency. However, the fragmentation problem of IoT devices results in a heterogeneous and disordered ecosystem, hindering the interoperating demands of computing offloading. What we need is an open-enabled ecosystem which allows third-party developers to create and update functions of deployed devices dynamically. We propose Things-representational state transfer (T-REST) which is an extension of the representational state transfer (REST) architectural style to address this problem. It integrates contents and computations together to inherit the uniform interface principle from REST. Three architectural constraints are added to REST: 1) reusable remote evaluation; 2) dynamic time series representation; and 3) computational hypertext. A novel event triggering mechanism is designed to decouple the tight coupling of front-end content accesses and back-end computations for resources. A reference prototype, named T-REST engine, is implemented to verify the proposed architecture with the open-enabled style, distributed semantics, and computing offloading features. Discussions show that T-REST preserves the benefits of REST. In addition, it achieves extremely lightweight footprints and can perform computing offloading through open-enabled architectures.

Investigating data accessibility of personal health apps.

ObjectiveDespite the potential values self-tracking data could offer, we have little understanding of how much access people have to “their” data. Our goal of this article is to unveil the current state of the data accessibility—the degree to which people can access their data—of personal health apps in the market.Materials and MethodsWe reviewed 240 personal health apps from the App Store and selected 45 apps that support semi-automated tracking. We characterized the data accessibility of these apps using two dimensions—data access methods and data types.ResultsMore than 90% of our sample apps (n = 41) provide some types of data access support, which include synchronizing data with a health platform (ie, Apple Health), file download, and application program interfaces. However, the two approachable data access methods for laypeople—health platform and file download—typically put a significant limit on data format, granularity, and amount, which constrains people from easily repurposing the data.DiscussionPersonal data should be accessible to the people who collect them, but existing methods lack sufficient support for people in accessing the fine-grained data. Lack of standards in personal health data schema as well as frequent changes in market conditions are additional hurdles to data accessibility.ConclusionsMany stakeholders including patients, healthcare providers, researchers, third-party developers, and the general public rely on data accessibility to utilize personal data for various goals. As such, improving data accessibility should be considered as an important factor in designing personal health apps and health platforms.

Elis: An Open Platform for Mobile Energy Efficiency Services in Buildings

The recent years have witnessed an enormous growth of mobile services for energy management in buildings. However, these solutions are often proprietary, non-interoperable, and handle only a limited function, such as lighting, ventilation, or heating. To address these issues, we have developed an open platform that is an integrated energy management solution for buildings. It includes an ecosystem of mobile services and open APIs as well as protocols for the development of new services and products. Moreover, it has an adapter layer that enables the platform to interoperate with any building management system (BMS) or individual device. Thus, the platform makes it possible for third-party developers to produce mobile energy efficiency applications that will work independently of which BMS and devices are used in the building. To validate the platform, a number of services have been implemented and evaluated in existing buildings. This has been done in cooperation with energy companies and property owners, together with the residents and other users of the buildings. The platform, which we call Elis, has been made available as open source software under an MIT license.

Perceived input control on online platforms from the application developer perspective: conceptualisation and scale development

ABSTRACTOver the last decade, applications of third-party developers have become the cornerstone of platform ecosystems’ success and sustainability. Given their importance, the procedures used on platforms to screen and sort out developers and their applications are crucial in regulating platform openness. Although Information Systems (IS) research has paid considerable attention to traditional control modes, there is still a lack of research on input control and how it is conceptualised and measured from the application developer perspective. We conceptualise perceived input control (PIC) as a second-order construct and empirically refine it over several rounds of validation concluding with a web-based survey of mobile application developers (N=100). Our measurement instrument not only captures application developers’ overall perceptions of input control across different platform contexts but also breaks these perceptions down into distinct lower-level input control factors. Furthermore, we demonstrate PIC’s nomological validity and predictive power in the context of IS continuance research.

Supporting governance of mobile application developers from mining and analyzing technical questions in stack overflow

There is a need to improve the direct communication between large organizations that maintain mobile platforms (e.g. Apple, Google, and Microsoft) and third-party developers to solve technical questions that emerge during the project and development of developers’ contributions in a Mobile Software Ecosystem (MSECO). In this context, those organizations may not know how to define and evolve strategies to govern their developers towards achieving their organizational goals. Such organizations use an infrastructure to support developers, for example, questions and answers (Q&A) portals such as Stack Overflow. Interactions among developers in these portals feed a Q&A repository that can serve as a mechanism to understand and define strategies to support developers. In this paper, we mined 1,568,377 technical questions from Stack Overflow related to Android, iOS, and Windows Phone platforms. Next, we performed comparisons among those MSECO regarding: (i) developers’ activity intensity, (ii) hot-topics (using Latent Dirichlet allocation algorithm) from all and more commented/viewed questions, (iii) “What” and “How to” questions, (iv) hot-topics from more viewed unanswered questions, and (v) relationship among questions and official developer events. From the results, we identified four key insights: recruiting, educating, and monitoring strategies; barrier reduction; management of technology insertion; and fostering of relationships. The relevance of the four key insights to support developer governance was evaluated by practitioners through a survey. Finally, for each key insight we associated a total of 10 strategies to support developer governance activities. Such strategies were extracted from 65 studies identified through a systematic mapping of the literature.

Multi-Layer Governance in Platform Ecosystems of Established Companies

In recent years, established companies across different industries have launched platform ecosystems. By collaborating with numerous third-party developers, these companies seek to benefit from inn...

Developing a Third-Party Analytics Application Using Australia's National Personal Health Records System: Case Study.

BackgroundMy Health Record (MyHR) is Australia’s national electronic health record (EHR) system. Poor usability and functionality have resulted in low utility, affecting enrollment and participation rates by both patients and clinicians alike. Similar to apps on mobile phone app stores, innovative third-party applications of MyHR platform data can enhance the usefulness of the platform, but there is a paucity of research into the processes involved in developing third-party applications that integrate and use data from EHR systems.ObjectiveThe research describes the challenges involved in pioneering the development of a patient and clinician Web-based software application for MyHR and insights resulting from this experience.MethodsThis research uses a case study approach, investigating the development and implementation of Actionable Intime Insights (AI2), a third-party application for MyHR, which translates Medicare claims records stored in MyHR into a clinically meaningful timeline visualization of health data for both patients and clinicians. This case study identifies the challenges encountered by the Personal Health Informatics team from Flinders University in the MyHR third-party application development environment.ResultsThe study presents a nuanced understanding of different data types and quality of data in MyHR and the complexities associated with developing secondary-use applications. Regulatory requirements associated with utilization of MyHR data, restrictions on visualizations of data, and processes of testing third-party applications were encountered during the development of the application.ConclusionsThis study identified several processes, technical and regulatory barriers which, if addressed, can make MyHR a thriving ecosystem of health applications. It clearly identifies opportunities and considerations for the Australian Digital Health Agency and other national bodies wishing to encourage the development of new and innovative use cases for national EHRs.

Intelligent Mortality Reporting With FHIR.

One pressing need in the area of public health is timely, accurate, and complete reporting of deaths and the diseases or conditions leading up to them. Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) is a new HL7 interoperability standard for electronic health record, while Sustainable Medical Applications and Reusable Technologies (SMART)-on-FHIR enables third-party app development that can work "out of the box." This paper demonstrates the feasibility of developing SMART-on-FHIR applications that enables medical professionals to perform timely and accurate death reporting within multiple different USA State jurisdictions. We explored how the information on a standard certificate of death can be mapped to resources defined in the FHIR standard Draft Standard for Trial Use Version 2 and common profiles. We also demonstrated analytics for potentially improving the accuracy and completeness of mortality reporting data.