¹Tércio Pacitti Institute, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), Brazil
²Center for Studies and Advanced Systems of Recife (CESAR), Brazil

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Abstract—Business transformation through Information Technology has been widely discussed. Nowadays, thanks to the growing number of smartphones, these changes are frequent, and knowledge becomes increasingly more valuable, and to that end, a whole new economic approach take place. The present paper aims to identify new research opportunities motivated by the growth of mobile solutions. It implements a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) in order to understand which are the Core Foundations of the Mobile App Ecosystem, pointing out the current situation of this research area and further strengthening the debate on the most relevant views of this ecosystem. This SLR includes primary studies listed from 2011 through 2016, resulting in a total of 1052 candidate publications, among which 30 publications were selected after a screening process. This paper concludes that academic community research is focused on four topics found within the selected papers, that should describe the Core Foundations of Mobile App Ecosystem: User, Developer, Store, and Publicity. This paper also shows a relationship graph between the selected publications, illustrating the representativeness of these works in this area. It also points out the locations where the Mobile App Ecosystem researches are being conducted. Furthermore, this SLR shows that there is a clear lack of works that combine these four core foundations.

Index Terms—App economy, app store, mobile platform, software ecosystem.

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Cite: Antoanne Pontes, Mônica Ferreira da Silva, Antonio Juarez Alencar, Eber Assis Schmitz, "Core Foundations that Support the Mobile App Ecosystems," Journal of Software vol. 12, no. 7, pp. 581-597, 2017.