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1. Introduction
The use of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets has been increasing over time. Accordingly, individuals spend a considerable amount of time using mobile apps at an average of five to six hours per day in the USA (Statista, 2022). Furthermore, many individuals have more than one mobile device (Pew Research Center, 2018). The growing use of mobile apps and multiple mobile devices create several challenges. For instance, users need to access increasing amounts of data through different devices, often exceeding storage capacity. Users also need to access data through multiple mobile devices. To meet these needs, mobile app developers use cloud computing technologies to develop mobile cloud computing (MCC) apps (Noor et al., 2018). MCC refers to a computing model integrating mobile computing and the cloud, where the latter provides large remote storage and processing for mobile devices (Shamshirband et al., 2020; Wang et al., 2019). A large number of mobile apps are now designed as MCC apps to offer benefits such as a larger storage capacity and simultaneous access from multiple devices.
Despite their benefits, MCC apps raise concerns as users provide a wide range of personal data to them (e.g. Evernote, Dropbox, OneDrive) (Noor et al., 2018; Wang et al., 2019). Prior research recognizes mobile app users’ concerns and categorizes them into privacy concerns and security concerns (Balapour et al., 2020). Privacy is about information control and governance (Bansal, 2017; Menard and Bott, 2020), and the privacy issue with MCC apps is the lack of direct control over data stored in the cloud (Wang et al., 2019). On the other hand, security deals with protecting information against external threats (Nikkhah and Grover, 2022; Shamshirband et al., 2020). As users tend to use MCC apps with more than one mobile device, the authentication of mobile devices in the cloud, authorization of an MCC app to access user data, data integrity during the transfer from the mobile device to the cloud, and data breaches of the cloud services are the main security concerns (Nikkhah and Sabherwal, 2021; Wang et al., 2015). Such concerns could be costly for app developers if they drive users to remove apps as acquiring new users costs much...