The Conflicting Goals of Application Discoverability and Quantity of Applications: The Facilitating Role of IT Artifacts in Mobile Application Stores

摘要

As people adopt applications for hand-held devices, mobile application stores are becoming more widely used in everyday life. For example, Apple's application store, App Store, has over 350,000 applications, and achieved 10 billion downloads in January 2011. With so many apps to sort through, finding the right ones to download can be a painstaking task for consumers. In spite of such difficulties, the App Store has had overwhelming success, offering a much higher number of applications than competitors such as Android Market. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to understand the dynamics of application discoverability and quantity of applications. Drawing on concepts from environmental psychology, the present study identifies the effects of application discoverability and quantity of applications on user satisfaction with mobile application stores. We also investigate the facilitating role of information technology (IT) artifacts (e.g., iTunes in App Store) for managing the conflicting goals of application discoverability and quantity of applications. Specifically, our research framework can be differentially determined by the degree of information specificity that application searchers have.