App Imperialism

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.