Following the code: What apps reveal about US–China tech competition
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The fierce competition between the United States and China over global dominance of digital markets increasingly raises a pressing question: is the internet on the verge of splitting into incompatible spheres of influence? A new study in Big Data & Society argues that these tensions are not only visible in headline-grabbing disputes over chips, data security, or social media platforms, but are quietly embedded in everyday technologies.
Mobile apps, in particular, offer an overlooked vantage point for observing this shift in the balance of global tech power. Beneath their familiar interfaces, apps depend on a network of servers and services, links that are constantly updated and reveal dependencies on specific organisations and businesses. As Chinese tech platforms expand internationally and US companies seek to maintain their dominance, the infrastructural footprints left in app code can reveal if and how digital ecosystems reorganize themselves around these competing poles. Against this background, the new study introduces a novel approach to map apps’ histories by analysing the URLs embedded in their code, and a tool, Janus, to automate the collection and analysis through a longer span of time.
Janus, named after the two-faced Roman god looking at opposite directions, is a compact metaphor for the paper’s method. By looking back at apps' past connections, Janus helps understanding how data flows shape the present and future of digital ecosystems. The approach builds on a tradition of archival app research and combines automated URL extraction with visual mapping. Researchers can zoom out to see broad dependencies or zoom in to trace specific alliances over time. That makes this method useful both for quantitative network mapping and for qualitative research building concrete leads to follow up interviews or policy analysis.
Key takeaways from this study include:
Embedded URLs in app code preserve evidence of the services and infrastructures an app once relied on. Analyses of financial apps, including the Kazakhstani “super-app” Kaspi, reveal shifting partnerships and the increasing centrality of certain platform services over time.
Treating archived app versions like layers of history allows researchers to reconstruct technological change. It also serves as an entry point for further investigation, either deeper into the app’s own architecture or outward to the wider ecosystem of interconnected networks.
Janus offers a new perspective for exploring the material foundations of digital ecosystems. This method helps to illuminate concerns about the “splinternet” — the possibility of a fragmented internet — a discussion that has resurfaced in debates about technological decoupling, particularly between the U.S. and China.
For reading more about Janus, access the full article:
Burroughs, J., Mathew, A., & Oreglia, E. (2025). Using archival versions of apps to understand emerging digital ecosystems. Big Data & Society, 12(4). https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517251382825