Veni-grant NWO for Anne Helmond
App ecosystems: A critical history
The aim of this project is to write the first critical history of the app ecosystem. People spend much of their time online using apps to communicate with people and to share content. Yet, despite their popularity we know little about the development of individual apps, their emergence as a new media form, and their native environment, the app stores. There are three important developments that require urgent attention: the progressive (i) securitization of daily life, augmented by the rise of apps, prompting surveillance and privacy risks; (ii) concentration of app markets by app stores, dominated by Facebook, Apple, and Google, causing rapid conglomeration; and (iii) platformization of the app ecosystem, further consolidating the dominant position of social media platforms. In order to analyze these three issues, we need to develop techniques to historicize and understand their developments. Apps are ephemeral media that are continuously updated, rendering older versions unavailable.... >
