Abstract

As the spread of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) continues to be a global challenge, there have been numerous efforts and actions from both government and private organizations towards keeping their community members healthy and safe. One of the approaches is to use mobile apps to trace contacts and update the status of the infected individuals efficiently and conveniently so that the spread of COVID-19 can be minimized and contained. While these apps could offer many advantages, it also raises serious privacy concerns for many users and hence possibly refusing to adopt it. In this study, we aim to understand the users’ expectations on the privacy protections and the provisions under which they are willing to use COVID-19 apps. We believe our study results can guide policymakers and app developers on the design, deployment, and acceptability of the COVID-19 apps that can be widely adopted.

INTRODUCTION

In December 2019, a novel coronavirus was first identified in Wuhan, China, and it quickly became a global challenge with over 10 million cases worldwide being confirmed within six months according to WHO’s situation report (2020). The coronavirus disease in 2019 was further named COVID-19 by WHO, and the WHO Director General declared it as a public health emergency of international concern in January 2020 (R&D Blue Print, 2020). The COVID-19 pandemic has had serious negative consequences on individuals around the world, not only by threatening their physical health but also by changing their lifestyles and daily routines. Because of the pandemic lockdown and social distance restrictions, people are forced to start self-quarantine, gatherings are limited, and telecommuting is encouraged instead of meeting in person. Therefore, it has been critical that the governments/health organizations swiftly respond to the pandemic and assist the ones most in need.

Rapidly advancing mobile technology has made mobile games a leader in the global games market. As the market size of mobile games has grown, the competition has also accelerated enormously. Thus, in order to ensure success, mobile games must sustain their initial boom for a long time, as well as attract enough users to solidify their installed base. The purpose of this research is to detect diffusion patterns and identify the determinants of mobile games’ growth and decline hazards. The results show that mobile games have a distinctive brand-level life cycle in which the growth possibility decreases monotonically over time after the release, while the decline possibility rises after reaching the peak and then later begins to fall. This paper shows how the games’ characteristics affect their attracting/holding power. The study provides implications for developers and distributors in terms of how to design, market, and manage mobile games.

Introduction

Rapidly advancing mobile technology has enabled virtually everything to happen in the palms of our hands. This revolution has also changed the global games market. Consumers no longer only rely to their PCs or consoles to play games. Instead, they have grown accustomed to using their hand-held smartphones or tablet PCs to enjoy an immersive gaming experience. Newzoo, a game consulting company, recently reported that the market share of mobile games has already overtaken that of PC and console games. The scale of the mobile games market is expected to reach $36.9 billion at the end of 2016, which is almost 37% of the whole market. The market share is predicted to grow up to 45% by 2019.1 As the market has grown enormously, many game developers have entered the market and have produced a tremendous number of games, which in turn has accelerated the competition. According to an online statistics company, Statista, the number of apps and games submitted per month for release on the iTunes App Store is increasing rapidly [from 3394 (Jan 2012) to 19,130 (Jan 2016)].2 From this hard struggle for existence, the product life cycle of apps has decreased to 54.84 days as of 2012, which is much shorter than that of traditional product categories (Liu, Jia, & Guo, 2014).

1- Introduction

2- Objectives of study

3- Literature review

4- The conceptual model

5- Methodology

6- Discussion of findings

7- Conclusion

References

Abstract

Significant knowledge exists regarding the application of dynamic capability (DC) frameworks in large firms, but their impact on smaller organisations is yet to be fully researched. This study surveyed 1162 small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) in Lagos in an effort to understand how SMEs in developing country contexts use mobile apps to enhance their businesses through DCs. Through the use of the covariance-based structural equation modelling (SEM) technique, the study explored the fitness of a conceptual formative model for SMEs. The model assembled 7 latent variables namely: mobile app usage, adaptive capability, absorptive capability, innovative capability, opportunity sensing ability, opportunity shaping ability and opportunity seizing ability. Subsequently, 15 hypotheses aimed at testing the relationships between the latent variables were developed and tested. The findings revealed that mobile app usage increases the adaptive, absorptive and innovative capabilities of SMEs. Absorptive capabilities help SMEs to maximise opportunities, while innovative capabilities negatively influence SMEs’ tendency to maximise opportunities. The results failed to establish a direct relationship between mobile app usage and SMEs’ ability to maximise opportunities. The research outcomes indicate that SMEs in Lagos respond to opportunities innovatively but they seldom exhibit innovation in order to create opportunities. The heterogeneous nature of SMEs complicates any clear-cut narrative as to how SMEs in Lagos should employ mobile apps to create and maximise opportunities. However, mobile apps could induce innovation and, as such, impact significantly when developed and applied to the contextual requirements of SMEs. The research revealed the untapped potential of SMEs’ mobile app usage in Lagos.

Introduction

The dynamic capability (DC) framework affirms that sustaining a competitive advantage in unstable business environments demands the continuous reconfiguration of resources (Helfat et al. 2007; Kuria & Kitenga, 2014). Small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) are increasingly adopting ICT as a strategy to sustain this competitive advantage (Wang & Shi, 2011). SMEs do this through adopting strategies which appeal to customers’ propensity to use mobile apps because of the flexibilities that mobile apps offer (Chou et al., 2013). Whereas the usefulness of DCs in large firms has been significantly researched, there is limited knowledge as to the relevance of the DC framework in smaller organisations, like SMEs. Bearing in mind that SMEs are considered as the foundation of national economies in developing countries, this study sought to understand how SMEs use mobile apps as part of their DCs. This study focused on SMEs in Lagos, Nigeria. In the Nigerian context, SMEs are defined as businesses which employ fewer than 50 persons and which have an annual turnover of 50 million Naira (158,000 USD) (SMEDAN & NBS, 2013). SMEs create an economic buffer and contribute substantially to the development of many countries (Kingdom & Taylor, 2015) as they stimulate entrepreneurship, create jobs, trigger innovation and accelerate rural industrialisation (Ayanda & Adeyemi, 2011; Kale, 2015). The Small and Medium Enterprises Development Agency of Nigeria (SMEDAN) noted that in 2013 there were 36,994,578 micro businesses, 68,168 small businesses and 4,670 medium sized businesses in Nigeria. Despite these impressive numbers, unemployment, crime and poverty in Nigeria, as in many other developing countries, remain unsolved issues.

The operating system is a program that acts as an intermediary between a computer user and the computer hardware. We shall use both the abbreviation OS and the complete denomination operating system. An operating system has the following main objectives: first it has to execute user programs and facilitate troubleshooting for users; secondly it has to make the computing system easy to use; and third it has to use efficiently the hardware of the computing system [1], [2]. The operating system offers services to both users and developers who make possible the operation of a computer without the need of employing low-level hardware controls, which are difficult run. The operating system provides relatively uniform interfaces to access a wide range of devices the computer interacts with, from input/output devices, such as printers or digital cameras, to wire or wireless network components that ensure communication among computers. The operating system allows users to create, manage and organize different types of files [11]. Most modern operating systems provide graphical interfaces (GUI – Graphical User Interface) to ensure the relatively easy usage for customers [6], [9], [10], [18].

II. OPERATING SYSTEMS

Operating systems usually provided a set of APIs, named system calls. However safer operating systems have been adopted recently. Currently we have multithreading and multicore architectures integrated into our operating systems. Modern operating systems for mobile devices support many media formats: audio, video, image, and may use video cameras, touchscreens, GPS, accelerometers, accelerated 3D graphics and other types of sensors. System calls have changed so dramatically in the past two years that they actually became irrelevant. This change may be attributed to two companies, Apple and Google, which are real innovation forces. With the launch of the iPhone by Apple a new paradigm has been introduced on the market, i.e. the one where the keywords are controlled user interfaces and application stores. Google followed this example with the introduction of the Android operating system, which was quickly adopted by both application developers and users. This caused a major change in the way we think about operating systems, [8], [12], [13], [14], [15].