China is one of the largest Android markets in the world. As Chinese users cannot access Google Play to buy and install Android apps, a number of independent app stores have emerged and compete in the Chinese app market. Some of the Chinese app stores are pre-installed vendor-specific app markets (e.g., Huawei, Xiaomi and OPPO), whereas others are maintained by large tech companies (e.g., Baidu, Qihoo 360 and Tencent). The nature of these app stores and the content available through them vary greatly, including their trustworthiness and security guarantees.As of today, the research community has not studied the Chinese Android ecosystem in depth. To fill this gap, we present the first large-scale comparative study that covers more than 6 million Android apps downloaded from 16 Chinese app markets and Google Play. We focus our study on catalog similarity across app stores, their features, publishing dynamics, and the prevalence of various forms of misbehavior (including the presence of fake, cloned and malicious apps). Our findings also suggest heterogeneous developer behavior across app stores, in terms of code maintenance, use of third-party services, and so forth. Overall, Chinese app markets perform substantially worse when taking active measures to protect mobile users and legit developers from deceptive and abusive actors, showing a significantly higher prevalence of malware, fake, and cloned apps than Google Play. CCS CONCEPTS• Information systems → Web mining; • Security and privacy → Mobile and wireless security; • Networks → Mobile networks;

Non-advertising-based mobile apps face several critical challenges when trying to monetize their free services; among them: the choice of pricing strategies ( hard landing vs. soft landing, i.e., a “pay or churn” paywall or continue offering limited free services to existing users after monetization) and aspects of product design (whether to provide exclusive secondary offerings to paying users). We implemented a large-scale randomized field experiment with an app firm to test the causal effects of such pricing and product design strategies. Results show that both soft landing and exclusive secondary offerings decrease existing app users’ willingness to subscribe; but there is a positive interaction between these two strategies on subscriptions. We propose a theoretical framework, discuss potential mechanisms that might be at play, and conduct robustness checks to rule out several alternative explanations. A customer survey by the firm and an experiment on Prolific provide further support for the theoretical mechanism. To assess generalizability, we conducted a second field experiment and obtained consistent results. We also report the results from the actual implementation of the best performing strategy by the firm. Our research provides guidance on possible theoretical underpinnings of users’ responses and important managerial implications for app monetization.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract