Users' Continuance Intention to Use a Mobile Application: Adapting Store Personality as Application Personality

Introduction

Every day new applications are added to the App Store and Google Store. People download many applications but only a few of them are used frequently. One in four users gives up on mobile applications after a single use (Perez, 2016). Companies are struggling so hard to retain those users who have downloaded their applications and drop them immediately. This situation has triggered questions like “Why is this the reality?” and “What is our perspective to solve this problem?” It is very essential to have a deep understanding of your product’s users. Typically, it takes a few seconds to decide to download a mobile application. The problem arises when it comes to ensuring the continued use of these applications.

According to the Internet World Stats report (Miniwatts, 2020), 63.2% of the world’s population has access to the Internet. In China, according to the Chinese government, in 2018, 802 million people actively using the Internet (i.e., about 47% of the total population) (McCarthy, 2018). Most surprisingly, 788 million people (i.e., about 98% of the people using the Internet) access the Internet through their mobile phones. This shows how mobile technology has become an indispensable part of their day to day life. The emergence of the smartphone and the use of the Internet has strongly affected service markets (Lee, Kim, & Hong, 2017). Users can easily search for information and download mobile applications, games, and videos with their mobile devices. Attracted by the great market, service providers have released a variety of mobile applications. The development of features of mobile applications has also helped businesses to effectively address their customers. Not only the big name brands like Walmart but also small businesses have started using the service offered by mobile applications. As of March 2017, the number of applications has exceeded 2 million in Apple's App Store, the cumulative application of the download was more than 180 billion times (iTunes, 2019; Statista, 2020). When the number of users increases, the need to explore the services offered by the mobile application arises (Kim et al., 2014). Despite the success of some, the majority of mobile applications fail outright or are not as successful as expected (Deloitte, 2012). For instance, only 1 percent of all mobile applications are downloaded more than one million times and, once downloaded, one in four mobile applications are never used again (Deloitte, 2012).

Mobile phones have brought many significant advantages to businesses like ubiquity, which allows users to conduct processing at anytime from anywhere. Ubiquity promotes user adoption of mobile applications. However, constraints of these mobile terminals like small screen size, inconvenient input, and slow responses may negatively affect the interaction of users and impede continuous use. No matter how hard service providers try to invest their effort and resources to release mobile applications to make their services available to users if they cannot retain users and facilitate continued usage, they will fail to recover their cost and achieve success (Zhou, 2013). Furthermore, the intense competition and lower switching costs have placed a significant influence on the service providers to come up with a practical solution to retain users. Hence, it is necessary to identify factors affecting the continuous usage of mobile applications.