Addictive Features of Social Media/Messenger Platforms and Freemium Games against the Background of Psychological and Economic Theories

Abstract

Currently about 2.71 billion humans use a smartphone worldwide. Although smartphone technology has brought many advances, a growing number of scientists discuss potential detrimental effects due to excessive smartphone use. Of importance, the likely culprit to understand over-usage is not the smartphone itself, but the excessive use of applications installed on smartphones. As the current business model of many app-developers foresees an exchange of personal data for allowance to use an app, it is not surprising that many design elements can be found in social media apps and Freemium games prolonging app usage. It is the aim of the present work to analyze several prominent smartphone apps to carve out such elements. As a result of the analysis, a total of six different mechanisms are highlighted to illustrate the prevailing business model in smartphone app development. First, these app-elements are described and second linked to classic psychological/economic theories such as the mere-exposure effect, endowment effect, and Zeigarnik effect, but also to psychological mechanisms triggering social comparison. It is concluded that many of the here presented app-elements on smartphones are able to prolong usage time, but it is very hard to understand such an effect on the level of a single element. A systematic analysis would require insights into app data usually only being available for the app-designers, but not for independent scientists. Nevertheless, the present work supports the notion that it is time to critically reflect on the prevailing business model of ‘user data in exchange for app-use allowance’. Instead of using a service in exchange for data, it ultimately might be better to ban or regulate certain design elements in apps to come up with less addictive products. Instead, users could pay a reasonable fee for an app service.

Social Networks Use Disorder and Associations With Depression and Anxiety Symptoms: A Systematic Review of Recent Research in China

“…There are different SNSs used in China, among these are WeChat R , Weibo R , Qzone R , and QQ R (see also recent developments with the TikTok R platform showing huge growth rate in user numbers). The use of WeChat R has gained substantial popularity in China due to its multi-purpose character including payment functions and combining features of WhatsApp R and Facebook R (Gao and Zhang, 2013;Lien and Cao, 2014;Sampasa-Kanyinga and Hamilton, 2015;Montag et al, 2019a). According to statista.com, it has been reported that there are over one billion active WeChat R users (Statista.com, 2019) and it had reached 1.082 billion users by January 2019 (Weixin.qq.com., 2019), thereby showing the dramatic increase from the 300 million users in 2012.…”

Smartphone use disorder and future time perspective of college students: the mediating role of depression and moderating role of mindfulness

“…The majority of mobile applications are designed to prolong usage time leading to individual time distortion. Some scientists and technicians attempted to develop new techniques to measure and analyse smartphone addiction [90][91][92]. For example, Lin et al identified smartphone addiction via app-generated parameters, and the results suggested that recorded total usage time via app was significantly higher than self-reported usage time because of the time distortion effect [90].…”

“…However, Montag et al found that total length of weekly mobile phone usage in hours was overestimated and weekly outgoing calls were underestimated [91]. Furthermore, researchers reported that social media/messenger and freemium game applications were significant drivers of excessive smartphone usage; these applications could be much more addictive than traditional/classic computer/console games [92]. Hence, enterprises should seriously consider how to develop less addictive products and recognise what kinds of approaches facilitate use reduction and create the healthiest effects.…”

Missing Out on Life: Parental Perceptions of Children’s Mobile Technology Use

“…Second, mobile technologies provide users with unlimited content, which is increasingly tailored to their needs and preferences [26]. Importantly, the presentation of this content is frequently optimized to extend user time on site [27]. Third, the portability of mobile technologies allows for user interactions anywhere and at any time [28].…”