A large scale analysis of mHealth app user reviews

Abstract

The global mHealth app market is rapidly expanding, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic. However, many of these mHealth apps have serious issues, as reported in their user reviews. Better understanding their key user concerns would help app developers improve their apps’ quality and uptake. While app reviews have been used to study user feedback in many prior studies, many are limited in scope, size and/or analysis. In this paper, we introduce a very large-scale study and analysis of mHealth app reviews. We extracted and translated over 5 million user reviews for 278 mHealth apps. These reviews were then classified into 14 different aspects/categories of issues reported. Several mHealth app subcategories were examined to reveal differences in significant areas of user concerns, and to investigate the impact of different aspects of mhealth apps on their ratings. Based on our findings, women’s health apps had the highest satisfaction ratings. Fitness activity tracking apps received the lowest and most unfavourable ratings from users. Over half of users who reported troubles leading them to uninstall mHealth apps gave a 1-star rating. Half of users gave the account and logging aspect only one star due to faults and issues encountered while registering or logging in. Over a third of users who expressed privacy concerns gave the app a 1-star rating. However, only 6% of users gave apps a one-star rating due to UI/UX concerns. 20% of users reported issues with handling of user requests and internationalisation concerns. We validated our findings by manually analysing a sample of 1,000 user reviews from each investigated aspect/category. We developed a list of recommendations for mHealth apps developers based on our user review analysis.

The Effectiveness of Hands-Only Offline Application

“…People with higher education usually use health applications at a young age and have a good income, so they can easily use them (Carroll et al, 2017). The satisfaction level of most users increases with the use of health applications (Haggag et al, 2022), several respondents who use the application show good acceptance of 78.4% (Al-Jallad et al, 2022), as well as with the application of applications in cardiology respondents benefit (Kulbayeva et al, 2022). Several applications can be freely accessed, with 73.7% free downloading (Ayyaswami et al, 2019).…”

Exploring factors influencing the adoption of mobile healthcare technologies: perspectives from designers, consultants and users’ preferences

“…Better understanding their key user concerns would help app developers improve their apps' quality and uptake. User satisfaction levels were compared amongst several mHealth app subcategories to investigate the impact of different aspects of mHealth apps on their AJB 38,3 ratings, Haggag et al (2022). The patients' perceptions and healthcare employees' expectation, Mashhadiabdol et al (2014) should be considered in the mHealth app.…”

“…Better understanding their key user concerns would help app developers improve their apps' quality and uptake. User satisfaction levels were compared amongst several mHealth app subcategories to investigate the impact of different aspects of mHealth apps on their ratings, Haggag et al. (2022).…”

Willingness to Use Mobile Health Devices in the Post–COVID-19 Era: Nationwide Cross-sectional Study in China

“…Moreover, as the country with the largest population of mobile devices, China’s research on this topic is limited to specific minority groups, such as patients with cardiovascular disease [ 12 ] and social media users [ 13 ]. In light of the rapidly expanding global mHealth market [ 14 ] and the dramatic transformation of health care by telemedicine during the COVID-19 pandemic [ 15 ], the post–COVID-19 era is unlikely to resemble the prior world. It is essential to examine the willingness to use mHealth devices in a nationwide sample of Chinese people in the post–COVID-19 era.…”