The proliferation of mobile health (mHealth)—namely, mobile applications
along with wearable and digital health devices—has helped to generate a
growing amount of heterogeneous data. To increase devices’ and apps’
value via facilitating new ways to use data, mHealth companies often
provide a Web application programming interface (API) to their cloud
data repositories, which enables third-party developers to access end
users’ data after receiving their consent. Managing such data sharing
requires making design and governance decisions that maintain the
tradeoff between promoting generativity to facilitate complementors’
contributions and retaining control to prevent undesirable platform use.
However, despite the increasing pervasiveness of Web data-sharing
platforms, researchers have not sufficiently analyzed their design and
governance. By relying on boundary resource theory and analyzing
documents about 21 Web data-sharing platforms, we identify and 18 design
and governance decisions that mHealth companies must make to manage
data sharing and discuss their role in maintaining the tradeoff between
platform generativity and control.