A review of mobile services research: Research gaps and suggestions for future research on mobile apps

This working paper gives a review of research on mobile services. It starts with an overview of the growth in research on mobile services. Following this, the methodology applied to identify articles for the review is described along with an overview of the journals from which the articles are selected. The articles identified are categorized into conceptual, qualitative, and quantitative contributions. Based on the review, several research gaps are identified. The main relevant gaps identified are 1) only a few studies look into app-based mobile services. This seems reasonable as app-based mobile services are a rather novel type of mobile services, but it is still worrying due to the apparent success of these services. 2) Only a few studies look into effects of using mobile services, and when compared to the large amount of adoption studies, this is emphasized as an interesting path for future research. 3) Only a few studies seem to focus on mobile services developed for specific contexts. A few exceptions are, for example, two studies investigating in-store mobile services – mobile services tailored to support the shopping experience in a specific store. We see this as an interesting direction for future research as we also expect a growth in such types of mobile services in the years to come. 4) We also observe that a rather small part of the studies are applying experiments as the methodological design. To improve the validity of mobile services research, we argue for the importance of applying more experiment based research designs.