The ODA Section invites you to an ODA research seminar where Coen van der Geest, CBS, will give the following presentation:

Abstract
Owners of digital platforms provide Application Programming Interfaces (APIs)  to enable app development and innovation by third-party developers. APIs grant developers access to platform resources such as data or specific platform functionality. We investigate the effect of API usage on a developer’s ability to innovate apps with new features. Although using APIs is beneficial to app innovation because APIs are standardized and can be recombined, we argue that choosing to do so also imposes architectural constraints. Implementing APIs requires non-trivial development effort, and the resulting accommodations in the app’s source code and logic go at the expense of some degree of adaptive flexibility. We theorize that the benefits of recombination and the costs of architectural constraints operate jointly to produce a U-shaped relationship between API usage and app innovation, where moderate levels of API usage result in the lowest levels of app innovation. At this point, API usage yields significant architectural constraints but only limited potential for recombination. Furthermore, we argue that the U-shaped relationship between API usage and app innovation is moderated by other aspects of the app’s architecture. Specifically, we hypothesize that the relationship becomes flatter for apps with a more modular internal architecture, while it becomes steeper for apps that multihome. We find support for our theoretical predictions in a sample of 1,270 open-source extensions for Mozilla Firefox. Our paper provides a nuanced perspective on the innovation implications of API usage, and spotlight how different choices concerning the design of the app architecture interrelate to shape a developer’s ability to continue to fit apps with new features.

Authors
Coen van der Geest, Joey van Angeren, Hans Berends, & Bart van den Hooff

Everyone is welcome!