Abstract
Currently about 2.71 billion humans use a smartphone worldwide. Although smartphone technology has brought many advances, a growing number of scientists discuss potential detrimental effects due to excessive smartphone use. Of importance, the likely culprit to understand over-usage is not the smartphone itself, but the excessive use of applications installed on smartphones. As the current business model of many app-developers foresees an exchange of personal data for allowance to use an app, it is not surprising that many design elements can be found in social media apps and Freemium games prolonging app usage. It is the aim of the present work to analyze several prominent smartphone apps to carve out such elements. As a result of the analysis, a total of six different mechanisms are highlighted to illustrate the prevailing business model in smartphone app development. First, these app-elements are described and second linked to classic psychological/economic theories such as the mere-exposure effect, endowment effect, and Zeigarnik effect, but also to psychological mechanisms triggering social comparison. It is concluded that many of the here presented app-elements on smartphones are able to prolong usage time, but it is very hard to understand such an effect on the level of a single element. A systematic analysis would require insights into app data usually only being available for the app-designers, but not for independent scientists. Nevertheless, the present work supports the notion that it is time to critically reflect on the prevailing business model of ‘user data in exchange for app-use allowance’. Instead of using a service in exchange for data, it ultimately might be better to ban or regulate certain design elements in apps to come up with less addictive products. Instead, users could pay a reasonable fee for an app service.
Highlights
According to current estimates, about 2.71 billion humans use a smartphone worldwide [1].Without doubt, one of the major driving forces towards a totally connected world with the Internet available in everyone’s pocket was the inception of the iPhone in 2007 [2]
The present work is not a systemic review, but rather presents first insights into elements built-in social media and Freemium game apps. These insights have been derived by analysis of prominent and often used apps such as Facebook, WhatsApp, or Candy Crush
The depicted elements/features embedded in psychological and economic theory underline the notion that these elements have been designed to prolong app usage
Summary
About 2.71 billion humans use a smartphone worldwide [1]. One of the major driving forces towards a totally connected world with the Internet available in everyone’s pocket was the inception of the iPhone in 2007 [2]. The wide distribution of smartphones led to unprecedented opportunities enabling humans to find their way in unknown territory via services such as Google Maps, to reach out to friends and business partners via a myriad of communication channels, and abundant easy access to knowledge earlier only available via visiting a library and the study of lexicons. Res. Public Health 2019, 16, 2612; doi:10.3390/ijerph16142612 www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph
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