A user’s home country, socioeconomic status and culture type are all factors behind why a person prefers some apps over others. A new study says that the most important factor behind app trends is where the user lives.
Map of mobiles. Source: Ella Peltonen
"We wanted to study factors that govern usage of the mobile apps, particularly the role of geographic, demographic, and cultural values," said Ella Peltonen, Ph.D., of Ireland's Insight Centre for Data Analytics. "We carried out a large-scale analysis of geographic, cultural, and demographic factors in mobile usage. We studied the data of 25,323 Android users who used 54,776 mobile applications in 44 countries across Europe, Americas, Asia and Oceania," .
The research found that “English-speaking” countries, Japan and South Korea have the highest app usage in the world. These English-speaking countries include the U.S., U.K., Australia, Canada and New Zealand. Thailand and Singapore are also included in this category because they are frequent vacation spots for English-speaking individuals.
The lowest app usage data came from “mixed countries.” These countries include Argentina, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Pakistan and India. These countries had higher usage in sports and automotive apps, but overall they had lower usage than English-speaking countries.
Another factor behind app usage trends is what kind of culture the user is living in. “Masculine” cultures that have more pronounced gender roles like Japan, tend to prefer personalization apps. “Collectivist” cultures with more fluid gender roles, like Russia, prefer family-related categories of apps, like educational games and parenting apps. Finally, “individualist” cultures, like the U.S., value entertainment and leisure apps, like travel, local, sports, health and fitness, music and audio apps.
Socioeconomic status is also a factor behind app usage. Occupation, education and savings were found to be bigger factors behind a users’ app usage than age and gender. People who have similar socioeconomic status showed similar app usage data no matter where they lived.
"The results of our work show that there is a strong relationship between the type of apps people use and their geographic and socio-economic factors, suggesting that these different factors should be taken into account when studying mobile data. In addition, our results can be used to better target mobile apps in different countries, and for personalization," Ella Peltonen says.
The paper on this study will be presented at the 20th International ACM Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services.
