E-business evolution: An analysis of mobile applications’ business models

Prior scholars have deeply defined the sources of value, typologies, and value capture mechanisms of website businesses. The advent of new e-businesses, i.e., mobile applications, requires investigation into which are the successful variations of e-businesses that have been selected and retained for surviving the new digital era, and how they have been formed. A mixed qualitative-quantitative business model analysis of 2,250 mobile applications of the Google Play Store is proposed. Results are interpreted according to evolutionary lenses. Content apps, whose value is driven by their efficiency, lock-in, design, and ability to add complementary monetization mechanisms (i.e., In-App purchases) beside the ads value capture schema (or ‘mixed’ for ‘pay per download’ apps), are the ones that can survive digital Darwinism. E-business models and their innovations are the products of evolutionary processes; from that, e-business models should be evaluated and re-evaluated over time according to the modifications of the multi-level environment.