Mobile Application Development in FLOSS Platform: A Collaborative Network Approach

摘要

We are deluged by wide variety of mobile applications (thereafter terms as mobile apps) to run on our mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. However, few studies have been conducted to investigate the issue of how mobile applications are developed in academia so far. In order to bridge such gap, we collected data on mobile application development projects from the largest FLOSS (Free and open-source software) platform, i.e., SourceForge, longitudinally. Four key indicators, graph density, reciprocity, modularity, and dyad census asymmetry, which had been drawn from previous social network literatures, were adopted to investigate the collaborative network. We found that the interactive collaboration was especially important for mobile application development process. Developers formed centralized/mutual structure for collaboration instead of several collaborative subdivisions.