LA LEY DE ORDENACIÓN DE LA EDIFICACIÓN

Both personal computers (PCs) and mobile devices have been used alongside each other to perform or execute certain tasks or processes, but due to the increased penetration of mobile devices in various spheres of life in the past few years, and also because of the great quantum leap of the mobile device from was being only used as a tool of the voice transition and then became related to many of life activities such as social networking, multi-media exchange, business transactions and entertainment, so services providers have new demand to develop specific mobile apps software to satisfy the requirements and needs of the currents mobile users (Pentina, Zhang, Bata & Chen, 2016; TechCrunch, 2014)

Mobile apps in general are software applications designed to perform a particular process or action and tailored to be consistent with the uses and features of handheld devices, such as tablets, PDAs or smartphones.These mobile apps could be pre-installed as a part of the device operating system itself that installed by the manufacturers, or could be installed by the mobile users who need such software applications (Kim & Baek, 2018; Hayikader, AbdHadi & Ibrahim, 2016; Fenu & Pau, 2015).

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In the early stage of developing mobile apps, they had been designed basically for general, routine activities such as calendar, e-mail, weather, and stock market information (Hsiao, Chang & Tang, 2016), but as a result of the development and availability of mobile technologies there is increasing public demand to establish more mobile-based functions such as social apps, games, order-tracking, location-based services and banking. The growing and widespread use of smartphones has resulted in the extensive adoption of mobile apps, and increased the number of people who are familiar with using such technology (Mohd Suki & Mohd Suki, 2017; Hsiao et al., 2016). Mobile apps are usually classified into two main categories, based on their core functions: in one category are utilitarian apps such as business scheduling, order-tracking, stock trading, translators and banking; and the other category comprises hedonic apps such as downloadable images/music apps, games, chatting apps, social media apps (Kim & Hwang, 2012).

Nowadays, many businesses among diverse industries adopt mobile apps when they provide their services because of the exclusive benefits they could gain by using these apps such as better customer service, more specific targeting of customers, and enhancing the customer relationship management (Pentina et al., 2016; IAB, 2015). These apps offer new features and information that are required by services providers, such as identifying the user’s location, preferences, gender, age, and other personal data, which could be straightforwardly collected through the access that is given by the mobile user to such apps after agreeing the apps licences when they download them on their mobile devices. For example, some apps require access to some of the mobile features such as GPS, camera, storage, etc. (Pentina et al., 2016).

Banking sector like other industries is investing to enhance the mobility of their services, and the expected return of this investment resulted in various forms such as better customer loyalty, attracting new customers and retaining the current customers, which helped banks in achieving extra revenue and reducing some costs and saving cost and effort for customers as well (Fenu & Pau, 2015). Banks around the world employed the ubiquity of smartphones and tablets, to enable their customers to manage and access their bank accounts with no need

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to use desktop computers as the smartphones and tablets are convenient and could allow them to manage their accounts whenever and wherever by offering many services through both of mobile and web application channels, and providing new mobile payment methods (Fenu & Pau, 2015).

The increased usage of Mobile apps has led to further research into the adoption and use of M-banking apps. Moreover, the expanding availability of smartphones and tablets has extended the need for new M-banking solutions (Veríssimo, 2016). According to a study conducted by Mapa research (2012), over than third of banks websites have mobile device detection feature that could redirect the mobile users who visited or browsed some banks’ websites to an app store to download a specific M-banking app or redirecting to an M- banking specialised web pages. However, some tasks can be performed on apps using specific features that are only found on mobile devices, other tasks are only available on the desktop web, but anyway the fact is that using mobile apps is more convenient because of the ubiquity and portability of mobile devices (Fenu & Pau, 2015).

However, the utilisation of such apps to perform banking transactions by bank customers is still less than expected (Shaikh & Karjaluoto, 2015).While banks investing highly in such apps to enhance the customer value and consider the customers’ satisfaction is the main target of their business strategies, this creates a need to recognise how M-banking will add value to the customers. Also there is a real need to study all the factors that enhance it from the perspectives of bank customers (Veríssimo, 2016). This research focus on the adoption of M-banking apps, whichcan be considered as an utilitarian apps from the perspective of bank customers who use such apps, because many previous studies have investigated the general context of mobile apps in both of the utilitarian and hedonic categories, as described above, others have explained the differences between these two mobile apps categories (Kim et al., 2014) or concentrated on a particular mobile app as an illustrative contextual investigation; for example, mobile games (Park et al., 2014) and mobile banking apps (Hsiao et al, 2016; Fenu et al., 2015).

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As mentioned before, this research focuses on exploring the adoption of mobile banking apps from the perspective of bank customers, and this is justified by two main impulses: firstly, there is a need to distinguish mobile banking apps, which are utilitarian apps, from other, hedonic apps; secondly, there is also a need to distinguish mobile banking apps from other M-banking solutions such as SMS and web-based M-banking, as the majority of previous studies have focused on mobile banking in general, but few researchers have worked on this issue specifically (Veríssimo, 2016; Fenu et al., 2015).

2.7 Section 2: The Jordanian context: ICT and Mobile banking