Antecedents of Apps Download Intention: An Empirical Study of Google Play

A major concern of managers of mobile application (app) marketplaces is to enhance users’ download intentions. This study investigates the antecedents of users’ download intentions as well as the relationships among interactivity, “pleasure, arousal, and dominance (PAD) emotion,” and swift guanxi by applying the Mehrabian and Russell’s (1974) stimulus–organism–response (S–O–R) paradigm as a theoretical background for the conceptual framework. This study collected 1,209 samples and applied a structural equation modeling to verify that two-way communication, synchronicity, and responsiveness have significant and positive effects on apps users’ control emotion. Control has a significant and positive effect on arousal and pleasure. In addition, arousal has a significant and positive effect on pleasure. The contributions of this research confirm the significant and positive effects of interactivity on control as well as the effect of swift guanxi on apps users’ download intention and its mediation effect between pleasure and download intention. © 2023, Chinese Society for Quality. All rights reserved.