App Imperialism

This data set is from the App Imperialism research project conducted by the App Studies Initiative researchers at the University of Toronto. To critically engage with the political economy of platformization, this data set contributes to research on the concepts of platform capitalism and platform imperialism to situate platforms within wider historical, economic, and spatial trajectories. To investigate if platformization leads to the geographical redistribution of capital and power, we draw on the Canadian instance of Apple’s iOS App Store as a case study. App stores are situated in a complex ecosystem of markets, infrastructures, and governance models that the disparate fields of business studies, critical political economy of communications, and platform studies have begun to catalogue. Through a combination of financial and institutional analysis, our data questions whether Canadian game app developers are effective in creating economic revenue within their own national App Store. Given Canada’s vibrant game industry, one would expect Canadian developers to have a sizeable economic footprint in the burgeoning app economy. Our results, however, point towards US digital dominance and therefore we suggest the notion of app imperialism to signal the continuation, if not reinforcement of existing instances of economic inequalities and imperialism at the macro (platform), meso (app store), and micro (local industry) level.