A business-to-business perspective on mobile application stores

Mobile devices, namely smart phones and tablets, have recently experienced remarkable proliferation. Beside private users, companies realize the potential of increasing the mobile productivity of their workforce. In this paper, we take a business-to-business perspective on mobile app stores by evaluating the potential of particular app stores for business-related apps. For this purpose, we first review the existing landscape of mobile app stores, and then assess their suitability for business-to-business purposes. For some mobile platforms there already exist alternatives to the official app store. We also judge if they could serve as model for B2B purposes. Overall, we highlight three distinct cases from this analysis: the “Google case”, the “Apple case” and the “Web case”. For all of them we show how the distribution of B2B could fit in. We then take a look at the specific aspects that should be considered for designing app stores for B2B needs. We suggest concepts for realizing these aspects. Some of the aspects, however, remain open. We discuss them and propose considerable potential for further work.