A Study of Consumer Spending Behaviour in the Australian Mobile Application Market

The smartphone application industry among the fastest growing in the technology sector, it has reached multi-billion-dollar size since its inception a decade ago. Today, millions of apps are bought by smartphone users around the world every day, generating millions of transactions on app stores like The App Store and Google Play. The aim of this study is to investigate spending behaviour of mobile app customers in Google Play based on app products' attributes and experiences offered to users. To that end, the study invited Android mobile app users to participate in a questionnaire about their spending preferences on mobile apps. Their response data were analysed using regression analysis and paired sample t-test methods. The study found that 1) users are more willing to spend their money on useful apps than gaming apps, 2) users become less-conservative spenders the longer they spend playing mobile app games and 3) users become less-conservative spenders on apps that offer them native virtual currency to exchange with their real money. © 2018 IEEE.