The mobile phone was initially a technology only associated with voice calls – and primarily constrained to usage in cars. Subsequent generations of mobile phones featured voice connectivity, short text messages, and a small set of simple built-in applications, such as a calendar, address book, and games. Billions of users across both the developed and developing world adopted the mobile phone. As technology advanced, feature phones with basic multimedia capabilities emerged. Telecommunications operators created ‘walled gardens’ allowing feature phone owners to access (and pay for) a variety of contents, such as ring tones. In the late 1990s, NTT DoCoMo established, with the iMode phone, an open system for rich mobile websites. Here, contents providers could complement DoCoMo’s content and establish what in effect can be seen as a forerunner to current smartphone and tablet platforms. Around this time, a number of handset manufacturers began working on an early smartphone operating system, Symbian OS, originally developed for Psion’s Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs). Nokia subsequently acquired Symbian and released several versions of smartphones based on this operating system from 2002 to 2008, supported by a global community of application developers. The operating system supported users in downloading and installing apps even though the process was not considered user-friendly (Tilson et al., 2011).

Undeniably, the transformative landmark event occurred in 2007, when Apple launched the iPhone as a closed smartphone only supporting proprietary apps and user-defined shortcuts to websites. The superior user-experience redefined customer expectations of smartphones. Google quickly followed suit with their newly acquired Android operating system, which it openly licensed to handset manufacturers. Although Apple initially sought to keep the iPhone closed for non-native apps, this decision was challenged by the tens of thousands of customers ‘jailbreaking’ the iPhone operating system. Consequently, in July 2008 Apple opened the iPhone platform and introduced a strict quality assurance process for external apps. Again Google followed suit and in October 2008 opened its own app store – although initially without any quality assurance mechanisms. While companies, such as Symbian, Nokia, Research in Motion and Microsoft, all established rudimentary platforms before Apple and Google, the latter companies have defined the current industry standard for mobile platforms.

Apple and Google’s smartphone app platforms mobilised a large number of developers, ranging from individuals to large global corporations. Both players coordinate app development at arm’s length through software development kits (SDKs), application programming interfaces (APIs) and various quality assurance processes. In 2011, Nokia appointed Steven Elop from Microsoft as its new CEO. As one of his first significant actions, Mr. Elop wrote his ‘burning platform memo’ stating Nokia’s need for strategy change in light of Apple’s premium from their command of a large ecosystem of complementors (Ziegler, 2011). This memo illustrates how industrial focus shifted from value creation by making handsets towards making general-purpose ‘von Neuman machines’ for a steady stream of value-adding apps (Yoo, 2013). The leading app stores experienced remarkable growth in complements, with around 1.5 million different apps listed in each of Apple and Google’s app stores as of April 2015. Assuming around 50,000 lines of code in an average smartphone app (McCandless et al., 2014), this yields a very conservative estimate of 150 billion lines of code generated over just 7 years. A total dwarfing even the largest of programming projects, such as the reported 500 million of lines of code in healthcare.gov (McCandless et al., 2014).

A growing body of scholarly work studies platforms in a range of contexts and from different perspectives. Ciborra (1996) emphasised the strategic importance of the organization as a platform for improvisation and tinkering. This perspective deviated from the subsequent discourse on platforms in the emphasis on the need for short-term, emergent and adaptive behaviour rather than on long-term strategic planning. The subsequent mainstream platform literature (Gawer and Cusumano, 2002; Gawer, 2009) draws on the conceptual foundation from industrial innovation management to understand the coordination and innovation of distributed industrial processes (c.f. works by Abernathy and Utterback, 1978; Clark, 1985; Utterback and Suárez, 1993). Platform research within management in general highlights the different types of platforms. Gawer (2014) suggests the classification into four types: internal platforms, supply-chain platforms, industry platforms, and two-sided platforms. Thomas et al. (2014) classify platform-related research into the following four streams: organisational platforms, product family platforms, market intermediary platforms, and platform ecosystems.

Tiwana et al.’s (2010) study of software platforms calls for more platform research and Wareham et al. (2014) responded to this call with a study of software platform governance. The innovation dynamics of mobile platforms and ecosystems is a growing interest for a number of academics, such as Boudreau’s (2012) pre-smartphone study of PDA app innovation. Ghazawneh and Henfridsson (2013) explore the role of boundary resources for the platform owner to secure contributions from complementors. Eaton et al. (2015) develop this further by showing platform innovation as distributed process of boundary resource tuning. Tilson et al. (2012) compare the innovation dynamics of several mobile app platforms and de Reuver et al. (2010) explore possible roles of mobile platforms as catalysts for citizen participation. Basole and colleagues (Basole, 2009; Basole and Karla, 2011; Basole et al., 2015) analyse and visualise the mobile ecosystem. Selander et al. (2013) study the strategies of non-focal platform actors developing for more than one platform, and Gonçalves and Ballon (2011) discuss the mobile network operator business models shifting from software-as-a-service to a platform-as-a-service model.

Mobile platforms as multi-sided markets critically rely on architectural leverage (Thomas et al., 2014) through a critical mass of complementors and customers. Boundary resources (Ghazawneh and Henfridsson, 2013; Eaton et al., 2015) can support a highly distributed process subjected to combinations of centralised control and decentralised generativity (Tilson et al., 2010b). The issue of platform openness is therefore a critical issue for mobile platforms and it is therefore natural that several of the accepted papers address this issue.

The initiation of this special issue on mobile platforms and ecosystems back in 2012 was very much driven by the significant and powerful shift towards the industrial importance of mobile platforms, combined with the growing number of academics studying the subject. The special issue received 27 submissions of which 26 were sent for review. During the second round 12 manuscripts were developed further. This process resulted in five papers accepted for the special issue:

Ghazawneh and Henfridsson propose a typology of platform-based digital application marketplaces, in terms of openness. On the basis of a paradigmatic analysis, they find digital marketplaces differ substantially in their assumptions about actors, platform, environment, and legitimation. The analysis develops ideal types of marketplaces being closed, censored, focused, and open. The paper contributes to understanding the relationship between different types of application marketplaces, platforms, and platform ecosystems.

Alexander Benlian, Daniel Hilkert, and Thomas Hess explore developer perceptions of platform openness through a combined qualitative and quantitative approach and advances platform openness as a multi-dimensional construct. Platform openness is characterised in terms of transparency and accessibility of the technical development platform and of the distribution channel.

Rikard Lindgren, Owen Eriksson, and Kalle Lyytinen focus on the dynamics of ecosystems instigated by implementation of innovative mobile services. Specifically, they explore how such ecosystem dynamics lead to identity ambiguities and role dilemmas of stakeholders in the ecosystem. In their longitudinal case study on a road administration agency, they show how ecosystem dynamics drive the transformation from public administrator towards a digital service provider.

Jungsuk Oh, Srinivasan Raghunathan, and Byungwan Koh explore the key mechanisms of revenue sharing and value appropriation between different stakeholders in a platform-mediated mobile ecosystem using a game theoretic modelling approach.

Jan Ondrus, Avinash Gannamaneni, and Kalle Lyytinen examine how mobile payment platform openness impact its market potential at three levels: provider, technology, and user. Using both analytical modelling and theoretical analysis, they show that careful orchestration between actors and technologies in the mobile ecosystem is needed.

We consider this special issue a mere early beginning of the debate within Information Systems (IS) of the large variety of research questions to be explored within the broad context of mobile platforms and ecosystems. Given the explosive strength of the smartphone app phenomenon, we would indeed expect a much stronger body of research to emerge from the global interest in this issue. However, compared with the industry importance of the issue, there is indeed still relatively little on-going research on mobile platforms and ecosystems. The lack of primary data directly sourced from within the key-organisations is of course both a possible explanation and a cause for concern.

The paucity of research on mobile platforms and ecosystems can partly be seen as a special case of broader IS publication phenomena. First, there are only very few papers on mobile ICT at all published in the top IS journals (Sørensen and Landau, 2014). The issue of platforms and ecosystems can be seen as related to a broader infrastructure discussion within IS, and one, which also is represented by very few publications in the main outlets (Tilson et al., 2010a, 2010b). The mobile platforms and ecosystems are not disappearing anytime soon, and the academic discourse needs to further the understanding of, for example, the innovation dynamics, governance, strategies, and business models. Indeed, we would expect an expansion in the areas of digital innovation in which the understanding of platform dynamics will be a core concern. The focus may well remain on the smartphone, but mass-consumer adoption of wearable technologies, and the Internet of Things more generally, will likely spark further platform innovation. The trend that mobile ICT are becoming omnipresent in any type of industry will only serve to fuel the importance of the topic of platformisation, whether in energy, health care, telematics, education, and other industries.

Despite the promising area of mobile platforms and ecosystems research, we also see challenges ahead. Ambiguity on what constitutes a platform or ecosystem prevails in both practitioner and academic debate. As mobile platforms become ingrained in any type of engineering system, scoping issues arise on how far to draw existing metaphors. The subtle and indirect interactions between large numbers of app developers and platform providers that explain the generativity of mobile platforms require new methods of data collection to answer new generations of research questions. We hope this special issue paves the way.