Developer ecosystem
Passport
- Rock
- Human networks
- Depth
- 3 · Drill rig
- Time to dig
- 3–10 years
- Capital
- ◐ · medium
- Solo
- ~ partly
- AI
- ↑ AI-resistant
- Rent
- ~ partly
Essence
Third parties build businesses on top of you: apps, plugins, themes, integrators. The direction is the opposite of the integrations tag, where you connect to others — here others invest in you, and their investment becomes your moat: a two-sided network effect plus somebody else's switching costs working in your favour.
How it is built
Apple's App Store — other people's livelihoods as your moat
Millions of developers whose income is tied to the platform: users do not leave because all the apps are there, developers do not leave because all the users are there. An ecosystem is a moat the platform does not dig itself — it builds the conditions, and the moat is deepened with other people's money and time.
Salesforce AppExchange and the Shopify App Store — partners cover every niche
Thousands of apps and an army of integrators make the platform fit any industry without a line of code from the platform itself, and the consultancies that live on implementations become its sales channel. The key mechanism is letting partners earn: an ecosystem grows where people feed on it.
WordPress and VS Code — openness as gravity
Open extensibility attracted tens of thousands of plugins and themes, and every plugin is both a reason to choose the platform and a reason not to leave. For a small team this is the most accessible way to build an ecosystem: open the API and the SDK earlier and more generously than competitors do.
How it is bypassed
A compatible fork — steal the ecosystem instead of building one
Cursor forked VS Code and had, on day one, the editor developers were used to, along with its extension model — through an open registry, once Microsoft closed its marketplace to forks. The same trick runs as "OpenAI-compatible API" as an industry standard: any model provider inherits the tooling and SDKs written for the leader. Compatibility is the expropriation of somebody else's ecosystem.
Raid it with incentives
Ecosystems are for hire: Epic paid developers for exclusives against Steam, TikTok ran creator funds against YouTube, and Microsoft once won the platform wars with evangelism and developer tooling. The supply side multi-homes — the attacker buys its presence, and part of the audience follows.
Wait for the platform to shoot itself
An ecosystem stays loyal until the platform squeezes it: Twitter killed third-party clients with API pricing, Reddit did the same to apps, Amazon competes with its sellers through private labels, Apple takes 30%. Each such episode sends a wave of developers looking for a new home; the attacker only has to be the open alternative at the moment somebody else overreaches.
Verdict
An ecosystem is a moat built with other people's investment, and probably the most underrated gap in the taxonomy — "they build on you" is not the same tag as integrations. It is bypassed by compatibility, by buying incentives, and by patiently waiting for the platform to squeeze its own.