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The Smartphone Manufacturers’ New Product Development Performance in the Generation Transition of
Android Ecosystem: Exploiting Old Technologies to Enhance the Effects of Exploring New Technologies

old-generation platform technologies which help solve the existing problems and enhance
product performance.
To sum up, this study considers that in the platform-based ecosystem, exploitative
and exploratory learnings are complementary and synergistically affect innovative activ-

ities and new product developments. Accordingly, this study proposes the following hy-
potheses.
Hypothesis 1:

The higher the degree of the complementors’ exploratory learning of the new-generation
platform technology is, the better their new product development performance will be.

Hypothesis 2:
The higher the degree of the complementors’ exploitative learning of the old-generation

platform technology is, the better their new product development performance will be.

Hypothesis 3:

The higher the degree of the complementors’ exploitative learning of the old-generation
platform is, the greater the contribution of the exploratory learning on the new-generation
platform to the performance of new product development will be.

3. Research Design

The objects of analysis in this study are 11 smartphone manufacturers: Nokia, Sony
Ericsson, Motorola, Samsung, LG, Huawei, Xiaomi, ZTE, HTC, ASUS, and Acer. In 2019,

these 11 manufacturers accounted for 63.9% of the global Android smartphone market
share. In this study, I focus on Éclair Android 2.1, Gingerbread Android 2.3, Ice Cream
Sandwich Android 4.0, Jelly Bean Android 4.2, KitKat Android 4.4, Lollipop Android 5.0,
Marshmallow Android 6.0, Nougat Android on Google’s Nexus or Pixel phones 7.1, Oreo
Android 8.0, Pie Android 9.0, and Android 10.0, a total of 11 versions of the Android OS,

with the releasing time frame spanning from January 6, 2010, to October 15, 2019.
This study uses Python’s Beautiful Soup program to download the firms’ commits
(also known as contribution) in the Android open-source software community on the
website (https://android.googlesource.com). I use the commits data as a proxy variable to

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