Abstract
The Indian smart phone applications market is really flourishing with India ranked as number one in terms of the downloads made via Android and Google play store. However the smart phone application penetration is still low in rural India as compared to its urban part. This study is first of its kind which tries to explore two things, one the reasons, why rural Indian market is not growing in terms of smart phone application downloads/usage and second some antecedents that can affect the behavioral intention of rural customers for increased smart phone application usage. For this study authors resorted to ethnographic in-depth interview during pre-test stage followed by collecting of responses through administrated questionnaires in the second part. Around 346 responses were collected from ten villages in Rangareddy district in Telangana state, in India. SEM was used as the statistical tool to run the hypothesis. In terms of smart phone application development, this study is unique one which tries to throw light immensely on how the marketers/developers can increase the sustainability of smart application usage among rural consumers which happens to be an untouched profitable segment till this point of time.
Highlights
Today smart phones and the applications in it has become a technology of substantial interest in every people lives at a global level
The findings have shown that there is negligible smart phone ownership and smart phone application usage in rural India
Though the male respondents has outperformed the female respondents in terms of their smart phone/smart phone applications usage but still a majority of the respondents irrespective of their gender seemed to use their phone for calling, texting and watching videos mainly rather than using it for other purposes like: social networking, gaming, listening to music, following governmental news etc specially the senior respondents above 40 years
Summary
Today smart phones and the applications (in-built and downloadable) in it has become a technology of substantial interest in every people lives at a global level. Today smart phone performs almost all kinds of functions starting from reading newspaper, healthy diet selections, doing exercise, booking cabs, making hotel reservations, listening music and many more. For its ubiquitous nature it is being more and more popular among users. Seeing this increased customer acceptance of smart phone apps among consumers, marketers all over the world are working really hard to develop various kinds of smart phone applications to cater to the demand of this huge profitable market. According to App Annie index the worldwide mobile application market is expected to grow at 270 percent — from $70 billion in 2015 to $189 billion by 2020 (venturebeat.com, 2016). The worldwide smart phone application market represented $108,440 million out of 2016, and is required to develop at a CAGR of 19.2% to reach
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
