Android OEMs and their Contributions to AOSP: Impact of Exploratory and Exploitative Learning on Time to Market

Google’s Android Operating System (OS) is open-source software available for public use.
Several smartphone manufacturers (Original Equipment Manufacturers or OEMs) like Samsung
and LG use and contribute to the Android Open-Source Project (AOSP). These contributions
can be tracked using their commits to the AOSP, a public data set. This research will explore the
relationship between a firm’s or an OEM’s contributions to AOSP and marketing a product
based on the contribution type and date, which could ultimately contribute to the success of a
phone model and the firm. These contributions to AOSP can be in the form of a firm’s
exploratory and exploitative learning, which can be related to the Time to Market (TTM) of a
product, which would be a phone model in this research. I will use the mobile telecom data on
Android commits (software contributions) to understand the difference between exploratory and
exploitative learning of these Android OEMs. The dataset consists of the complete population of
Android commits written by software engineers worldwide between 2008-2022 (approximately
16 million observations), which Prof. Dallas and his colleagues have collected over a period.
Because Android is open source, this is free and open for public use. The data set highlights
some handset (mobile phone) companies contributing to Android and to which release (different
releases of Android), and how quickly they come up with a handset (or phone) after the new
version of the Android OS. I will be researching the time and type (exploratory or exploitative) of
these contributions and exploring what affects their TTM. This research could potentially lead to
discovering strategic management techniques and timed marketing in the Information and
Communications Technology (ICT) industry, focusing on firms that use and contribute to the
Android OS.