Understanding the impact of personality traits on mobile app adoption - Insights from a large-scale field study

The sheer amount of available apps allows users to customize smartphones to match their personality and interests. As one of the first large-scale studies, the impact of personality traits on mobile app adoption was examined through an empirical study involving 2043 Android users. A mobile app was developed to assess each smartphone user's personality traits based on a state-of-the-art Big Five questionnaire and to collect information about her installed apps. The contributions of this work are two-fold. First, it confirms that personality traits have significant impact on the adoption of different types of mobile apps. Second, a machine-learning model is developed to automatically determine a user's personality based on her installed apps. The predictive model is implemented in a prototype app and shows a 65% higher precision than a random guess. Additionally, the model can be deployed in a non-intrusive, low privacy-concern, and highly scalable manner as part of any mobile app.