Smartphone Operating System The Competition And Development Of The Research

The mobile Internet not only inherits the desktop Internet’s spirits of openness, collaboration and sharing, but also characterizes the mobile communication network’s instantaneity, convenience, privacy, marking and positioning. The features of interworking and mobility show the instinct superiority of mobile Internet unparalleledly, whose rapid development is becoming attractive worldwidely. The mode of "channel+service" led by mobile operators is been substituded for the mode of "smart phone OS+application trading platform" led by smart phone OS vendors. The smart phone OS vendors play a crucial role in the mobile Internet industry chain. At present, the research on mobile Internet at home and abroad have achieved certain accomplishment. However, with regard to the research on smart phone OS, most works have mainly focused on the aspect of technologies. There are less the contents referring to the commercial field, not mention to the systematic analysis and quantitative research.This study will specialize on the smart phone OS’s attributes, value chain, competitive strategies as well as development tactics. In this paper, the three innovative points are as following:(1) Based on network externality theory, the attributes of the smart phone OS are described and analyzed. In addition, we also research the profit model of the smart phone OS applying the theory of value chain.(2). According to the theory of two-sided market, we has established three types of competitive model on the smartphone OS and propose its competitive strategies.(3). Relying on the theory of user adoption, this study has presented the adoption model about the smartphone OS and propose its development strategies.In the first part of the paper, we firstly analyze the smart phone OS’s properties of network externalities, incremental marginal revenue and a positive feedback mechanism. which ensure smart phone OS can be implemented both vertically and horizontally differentiated pricing.Accordingly, Increasing the transfer costs can be applied to keep users. In terms of the competition among similar martphone OS products, they could concentrate on the patent-based technology standard. Futhermore, from the perspective of value chain, the smart phone OS has substituted charging money from cell phones and other mobile terminal for mainly charging a registration fee depending on the expansion of the mobile application trading platform for the mobile phone application developers, software and advertising revenue sharing. In addition, the operator’s traffic revenue sharing is also an important source of income.In the second part, our work focuses on the competition between two smart phone OSs. Firstly, by building the competitive model of the smart phone OSs with developers who adapt the OSs differently, we makes the conclusion that application developers have been given the different attention, so that the interests for the application developers to the two smart phone operating systems are not the same obviously. It also implies that two different smart phone OSs have different network externalities for application developers. Via this model, we has analyzed the competition between iOS and Symbian. Secondly, a model of smart phone OS is formulated to discuss their competitive relationship, which contains the mobile application trading platform and terminal hardware platform, and the model demonstrates that, as a system software, the smart phone OS combines the underlying hardware with the upper layer application software. Its competitive ability is related to not only the OS itself but also its supporting platform. Excellent application trading platform and superior high-performance hardware platform play a crucial role to enhance the competitiveness of the smart phone OS. Thirdly, relying on the proposed competition model of both opening and closed smart phone OS, we conclude that, when the indirect external utility that users produce to the application developers is greater than the one that application developers cause to users, the profits made by the opening smart phone OS will be higher than that made by the closed smart phone OS, and vice versa. Having nothing to do with indirect network externalities, application developers of opening systems is always less than the closed system numerically, and the amount of its users is always greater than that of the closed system. This model perfectly verifies the competition between Android system and iOS system. At the end of this part, we presents four competitive strategies for the smart phone OS, involving in further inspiring third-party software developers, strengthening the innovation of the mobile application trading platform, integrating with the terminal equipments with outstanding price cost, high-end users choosing the closed model and ordinary users preferring to the opening model In the third part of the paper, the development strategies of the smart phone OS are discussed. The user’s intention of using the smart phone OS is directly related to the utility attitude, perceived interest and system security. And the intention of using the smart phone operating system is indirectly affected by perceived usefulness, network externalities, usability, system compatibility as well as the user cost.