The Impact of 5G on App Usage : Winners and Losers

The 5G network provides faster speeds and more reliable connections that potentially will revolutionize a wide range of services and industries. Despite the heavy investments in 5G and the tremendous interest thus-far generated, its commercialization value is still not well understood. In the present study, we collaborated with a leading telecommunication company to investigate the impact of 5G on mobile users’ app usage. We propose that 5G can increase the usage of leisure-oriented apps through an experience enhancement effect but will decrease the usage of task-oriented apps through an efficiency enhancement effect. Based on a user-day-level panel dataset containing 4,813 users and 329 apps, we show that mobile users on average spend 20.183 minutes more (+6.12%) on apps using cellular data after the adoption of 5G. Consistent with our conjecture, the impact is highly heterogeneous across app categories: usage of Social and Entertainment apps increases by 3.621 and 16.991 minutes, respectively, whereas usage of Tool apps decreases by 0.312 minutes. Surprisingly, usage of Game apps does not see any significant change, even though they are mainly leisure-oriented. Further mechanism examinations indicated that both winning and losing apps exist within each app category, and that the app speed requirement contributes significantly to the impact of 5G on Social and Entertainment apps, but not on Tool or Game apps. Our findings reveal the heterogeneous impacts of 5G on different apps as well as a “chicken-and-egg” problem concerning a misalignment between app designs and 5G advancements