The Impact of Feature Exploitation and Exploration on Mobile Application Evolution and Success

Mobile device applications are the largest segment of IS with an estimated 5 billion users. Yet despite their widespread and growing use, there is little research examining how these mobile applications evolve with each new release update. To ensure market success, developers need to satisfy their user base by incorporating users’ reviews and feedback on the one hand and exploring new features and content that allow them to stay competitive on the other. Drawing on the organizational learning and innovation literature, the findings of the present study suggest that a mix of these two activities of exploitation and exploration in consequent app updates is likely to result in the app’s success. We further contribute to this body of work by examining the influence of users’ online review characteristics on exploitation and exploration activities in app development. The findings suggest that users’ convergence on similar issues (review concurrence) is likely to favor an orientation prioritizing exploitation over exploration activities, while the number of user reviews (review volume) has a curvilinear relationship with it.