PSYCHOLOGY AND EDUCATION (2021) 58(2): 254-265 An Interdisciplinary Journal 254 www.psychologyandeducation.net Sustainability of the Smart phone applications usage in rural India –An empirical study Souvik Roy 1* , Dennis Joseph 2 1 Department of Marketing & Strategy, IBS Hyderabad, IFHE University souvikroy@ibsindia.org 2, Department of Operations & IT, IBS Hyderabad, IFHE University dennisjoseph@ibsindia.org ABSTRACT The Indian smart phone applications market is really flourishing with India ranked as number one in terms of the downloads made via Android and Google play store. However the smart phone application penetration is still low in rural India as compared to its urban part. This study is first of its kind which tries to explore two things, one the reasons, why rural Indian market is not growing in terms of smart phone application downloads/usage and second some antecedents that can affect the behavioral intention of rural customers for increased smart phone application usage. For this study authors resorted to ethnographic in-depth interview during pre-test stage followed by collecting of responses through administrated questionnaires in the second part. Around 346 responses were collected from ten villages in Rangareddy district in Telangana state, in India. SEM was used as the statistical tool to run the hypothesis. In terms of smart phone application development, this study is unique one which tries to throw light immensely on how the marketers/developers can increase the sustainability of smart application usage among rural consumers which happens to be an untouched profitable segment till this point of time. Keywords Smart phone applications, Smart phone, Rural India, Downloadable, UTAUT2 etc Introduction Today smart phones and the applications (in-built and downloadable) in it has become a technology of substantial interest in every people lives at a global level. The multi tasking capability, ease of use, user friendly interface and ability to deliver almost all the necessary functions that was previously performed by the users via desktops has lead to higher user engagement among consumers ( Varnali & Toker 2010). Today smart phone performs almost all kinds of functions starting from reading newspaper, healthy diet selections, doing exercise, booking cabs, making hotel reservations, listening music and many more. For its ubiquitous nature it is being more and more popular among users. Seeing this increased customer acceptance of smart phone apps among consumers, marketers all over the world are working really hard to develop various kinds of smart phone applications to cater to the demand of this huge profitable market. According to App Annie index the worldwide mobile application market is expected to grow at 270 percent — from $70 billion in 2015 to $189 billion by 2020 (venturebeat.com, 2016). The worldwide smart phone application market represented $108,440 million out of 2016, and is required to develop at a CAGR of 19.2% to reach $311,249 million by 2023. Constant increment in the smart phone users and the development of special endorser base in the telecom business is driving the market development for the worldwide smart phone application market amid the estimate time frame (statista.com, 2018). The smart phone applications industry in India is deafening only lately. However, in this shorter time span India has outpaced countries like US, UK by displaying highest growth in the mobile application market in the year 2016 in terms of Google Play downloads (economictimes.indiatimes.com, 2017). Indian users downloaded over 6 billion apps in 2016, up from 3.5 billion in 2015 which was 15% higher than the overall download of the apps worldwide (ivemint.com, 2017). Currently India is ranked 29th globally by revenue on iOS and Google Play store in 2018 (thehindubusinessline.com, 2018). Application store revenue and downloads in India grew to 140 % and 250 % in 2018 over 2016 by making Indian market ranked 1 globally by combined downloads in iOS and Google Play store (economictimes.indiatimes.com, 2017). Furthermore the average smart phone user in the nation has 17 applications and the number is near the worldwide average of 25 applications