---
title: "Developer ecosystem"
description: "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."
canonical: https://moa.giglabo.com/moats/20/
locale: en
---

# Developer ecosystem

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- Sheet 20 / 35

## 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.

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