Sustainability of the Smart phone applications usage in rural India –An empirical study

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.