Understanding People's Switching Intentions of Health Apps from Exterior and Interior Drivers

Health apps are one important type of apps that are designed to assist users with recording their health-related behaviors and giving advice to improve their physical condition. However, health apps users typically face a potential dilemma of keeping on using current apps or switching to others. This study conducts an empirical investigation and proposes an exterior-interior factor model based on Push-Pull-Mooring (PPM) model to figure out why users want to switch from the current health app to another new one. Specifically, positive drivers (exterior power) and negative drivers (interior power) are proposed in the research model to investigate switching intentions for health apps. The former includes attractive alternatives, social influence, and dissatisfaction with the current health app; the latter includes procedural switching costs and habits. To explore the determinants, this study conducts a survey and collects 218 qualified responses to serve as our research samples. We then exploit structural equation modeling (SEM) to analyze these samples. The result reveals that our research model explains 57% of the variance.