An Exploratory Study on the Determinants of Mobile Application Purchase

The ability of offering various and abundant mobile applications has emerged as the knowledge of the smartphone has grown in the smartphone market. The mobile application market has emerged as a competitive new market with enormous potential. Although many users download paid or free mobile applications through the app markets such as the Appstore, there is no significant research regarding customer`s application purchase yet. Hence, we refer to the purchase motivation of mobile applications among experienced users who have bought paid applications. We conducted the interview with 30 users and suggest four categories of applications (productivity, entertainment, information, and social networking) and also classify the purchase intentions on each category based on the ground theory. The comparison analysis of the interview provides us what factors affect the application purchase. This framework may advance effective mobile application business model development, implicate the strategy for boosting mobile application market.