Acceptance Theory on Mobile Services and Applications

Abstract

Mobile telecommunications and mobile services/applications have gone through fundamental changes after the introduction of new mobile network technologies such as 3rd and 4th generation (Long Term Evolution). At the same pace, mobile services and applications’ development undergo huge changes with the introduction of new software, service platforms and Software Development Kits (SDK). As result of these changes, many new service platforms such Google with Android and Apple with iOS have been emerged. To our knowledge, there are several parties involved in mobile Telecommunication –like network operators, service and application provider and content provider. Several theoretical models have been formulated to investigate individual technology acceptance. However, many of them, if not all, have been criticised for not taking service characteristics and individual service perception into account. Therefore, the current research is intended to investigate whether the conventional acceptance theories are sufficiently enough to study users’ intentions and predict their behaviour or not. To do so, we have extensively analyzed literature with regard to mobile services. The results indicate that using the conventional acceptance theories as the sole research approach does not provide sufficient insights to understand user behaviour. Moreover, the findings suggest that we need to take several other critical factors such as context of use, user service perception, technology characteristics and mobile service platforms into account.