The adoption of public smartphone applications in Korea: Empirical analysis on maturity level and influential factors

• We examine the entire population of public smartphone applications in Korea.
• We build a maturity model and measure the level of maturity of public applications.
• We analyze factors influencing public application maturity levels.
• Various types of public applications have been actively implemented in Korea.
• The adoption of the public applications is at the initial stage in Korea.

With the rapid proliferation of smartphones, public smartphone applications (hereafter public applications) have emerged as a new technology and innovation toward smarter government. To assess the current status of the adoption of public applications in Korea, the authors measure the maturity level of these public applications by applying a newly developed ‘public application maturity model.’ In addition, the factors influencing the differences in the maturity levels of public applications are analyzed. It was found that Korean governmental agencies have adopted diverse public applications actively in an effort to deliver public services. The overall maturity level of public applications, however, is accessed as relatively low at present. Moreover, the results of the analysis of the factors influencing the maturity of public applications can be interpreted as showing that the government agencies have only followed the trend of the rapid proliferation of public applications without considering how high-level citizen-centric services could be delivered through public applications.