The development of public smart phone apps in Korea: empirical approach

With widespread proliferation of smart phones, public apps, the smart phone applications provided by government organizations and public agencies, have been emerging as a new channel of public information services in the era of mobile government (m-government). Despite the increasing necessity of research on the public apps, however, few studies have dealt with the public apps. Under these circumstances, this study has been in progress with following purposes: (1) to build a 'public apps development model' for describing the level of services of public apps; (2) to measure the overall level of public apps in Korea adopting the development model; and (3) to analyze the factors which determine the difference in the level of public apps services. Until now, a 6-stage public apps development model whose criteria are citizen-centricity and technological complexity of the public apps was built. In addition, the levels of 148 public apps provided by Korean central government were measured. As results, it is found that all kinds of public organizations including central government are actively providing various public apps and the overall level of public apps provided by central government is in a midpoint of the second and third stage. The authors plan to complement the public apps development model in order to enhance validity, and to measure a level of the public apps not only of central government but also of local governments and public agencies accordingly.