The hidden image of mobile apps: geographic, demographic, and cultural factors in mobile usage

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Date
2018-09
Authors
Peltonen, Ella
Lagerspetz, Eemil
Hamberg, Jonatan
Mehrotra, Abhinav
Musolesi, Mirco
Nurmi, Petteri
Tarkoma, Sasu
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Association for Computing Machinery ACM
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Abstract
While mobile apps have become an integral part of everyday life, little is known about the factors that govern their usage. Particularly the role of geographic and cultural factors has been understudied. This article contributes by carrying out a large-scale analysis of geographic, cultural, and demographic factors in mobile usage. We consider app usage gathered from 25,323 Android users from 44 countries and 54,776 apps in 55 categories, and demographics information collected through a user survey. Our analysis reveals significant differences in app category usage across countries and we show that these differences, to large degree, reflect geographic boundaries. We also demonstrate that country gives more information about application usage than any demographic, but that there also are geographic and socio-economic subgroups in the data. Finally, we demonstrate that app usage correlates with cultural values using the Value Survey Model of Hofstede as a reference of cross-cultural differences.
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Keywords
Mobile applications , Usage modeling , Cultural factors
Citation
Peltonen, E., Lagerspetz, E., Hamberg, J., Mehrotra, A., Musolesi, M., Nurmi, P. and Tarkoma, S. (2018) 'The hidden image of mobile apps: geographic, demographic, and cultural factors in mobile usage', MobileHCI'18, Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services, Barcelona, Spain, 3-6 September, 3229474: ACM, 10 (12 pp). doi: 10.1145/3229434.3229474
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© ACM 2018. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive Version of Record was published in MobileHCI'18, http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/10.1145/3229434.3229474