Driving user adoption of mobile apps through platform multihoming: The effects of multihoming delay and multihoming customization

Abstract

Developers release their mobile apps through multiple app store ecosystems to extend their reach and reduce their dependency on a single distribution platform and its governance mechanisms. While this topic has piqued the interest of a growing number of studies, key multihoming decisions faced by developers including when to multihome mobile apps and whether and how much to customize them for the multihomed platform have not yet been jointly examined. In addition, the potential role that the user value of mobile apps (hedonic or utilitarian) plays in developers’ multihoming decisions has largely been overlooked. To address these gaps, the present study jointly investigates the effects of multihoming delay and multihoming customization on the user adoption of mobile apps on the multihomed platform. It further investigates the moderating effects of the user value of mobile apps. The study employed a large dataset of mobile apps that were initially released through Apple's App Store and subsequently multihomed into Google's Play Store (N = 24,906). By combining traditional count regression model with a machine learning approach, the study derives a range of theoretical and predictive insights that significantly contribute to the mobile app multihoming literature.