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

Published: 03 September 2018 Publication History

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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cover image ACM Conferences
MobileHCI '18: Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services
September 2018
552 pages
ISBN:9781450358989
DOI:10.1145/3229434
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 03 September 2018

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Author Tags

  1. cultural factors
  2. mobile applications
  3. usage modeling

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  • (2024)Collective Pronouns, Collective Health Actions: Predicting Pandemic Precautionary Measures Through Online First-Person Plural Pronoun Usage Across U.S. StatesSocial Science & Medicine10.1016/j.socscimed.2024.117167(117167)Online publication date: Jul-2024
  • (2024)Spatial and Temporal Exploratory Factor Analysis of Urban Mobile Data TrafficData Science for Transportation10.1007/s42421-024-00089-y6:1Online publication date: 15-Mar-2024
  • (2023)A Test of the Mobile Phone Appropriation Model: A Comparison between Chinese and US SamplesAsian Communication Research10.20879/acr.2023.20.01220:2(95-124)Online publication date: 31-Aug-2023
  • (2023)You Are How You Use Apps: User Profiling Based on Spatiotemporal App Usage BehaviorACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology10.1145/359721214:4(1-21)Online publication date: 21-Jul-2023
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  • (2023)Understanding the Long-Term Evolution of Mobile App UsageIEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing10.1109/TMC.2021.309866422:2(1213-1230)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2023
  • (2023)Mobile Application Ranking with Transductive Transfer LearningDatabase Systems for Advanced Applications. DASFAA 2023 International Workshops10.1007/978-3-031-35415-1_11(151-165)Online publication date: 28-Sep-2023
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