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1. Introduction
Over the past two decades, the mobile app [1] market has indicated substantial growth in emerging economies as it brings a wide variety of benefits to them and their societies (Silver et al., 2019). In 2020, India was the fastest-growing app market (49% annual rate) across the globe (Washington, 2021). India presently has 700 million unique mobile phone subscribers, out of which 451 million were internet users (Washington, 2021). With the availability of faster internet technologies and mobility constraints posed by the recent COVID-19 pandemic, smartphones and data services have congregated into an ideal communication platform in emerging economies (Wetzler, 2021). Following these trends, businesses are exploring ways to exploit the huge business potential that mobile communication platform offers to serve their customers and making their presence visible through mobile app mediums. Research on mobile commerce is yet to catch up along with these mobile app trends, especially in emerging economies, to offer guidance and insights on the critical success factors of mobile apps.
Presently, consumer behavior research is predominantly based on empirical evidence from developed economies, especially using the USA and European context (Steenkamp and Burgess, 2002). Such a one-sided understanding of user-usage knowledge has exposed firms to mixed outcomes of mobile technology adoptions in emerging economies. Given their economic, cultural and demographic differences from developed economies, consumers in emerging economies perceive the value and risks of mobile commerce differently compared to their counterparts in developed economies (Wong et al., 2015). For instance, people in India remain reluctant to adopt convenience-focused mobile technologies, such as mobile shopping and mobile payment (Thakur and Srivastava, 2014), despite their rich exposure to mobile messaging and social app tools for exchanging textual and graphic information. These differences in value and risk perceptions can be effectively mitigated with the collaborative efforts of mobile app developers and connectivity providers (Madan and Yadav, 2018). In this regard, a robust understanding of the antecedents to mobile app success in emerging economies, such as South Korea, China, Brazil, South Africa, India and others, is relevant, given their high rate of mobile penetration in the recent few years (Lee et al., 2015).
In the past two decades, mobile commerce research grew in three phases following the industrial trends –...