Apple’s success is directly dependent on the availability of quality software developed by third parties, and the company’s introduction and management of its own programming language is a strategic effort to capitalize on unaffiliated labor, according to an analysis published by doctoral candidate Cole Stratton.

“Platform politics: Software as strategy in Apple’s platform ecosystem” appears in First Monday. Stratton uses Apple’s programming language Swift as a case study on the dynamics of platform ecosystems.

Stratton writes that the company understands that consumers buy Apple products in part because of the availability of quality Apple-compatible apps. The Apple-specific language introduces quality control and incentivizes the creation of apps that are difficult to shift to a rival platform. The company employs open sourcing to capitalize on free, crowdsourced labor. And while its public-private partnership education initiatives such as Everyone Can Code provide students with marketable skills, they’re an opportunity to use government funds to train a new generation in its proprietary platforms.

He concludes that Apple’s strategies are migrating “a significant portion of the global development community to a new programming standard that it controls.”