ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in introducing a large number of "emerging apps" to the mobile app market. These apps were developed and deployed quickly to address the urgency of the situation. This gave us an indication that the cycle of having new emerging apps will likely reoccur in every upcoming emergency in the future e.g. for advice and guidance during bush fires, floods, other pandemics, etc. We carried out an in-depth analysis of user reviews and version history release notes for 30 COVID-19 apps that were developed in a great hurry in 2020. We identified many diverse accessibility issues that exist, not just related to conventional challenged end-user accessibility issues, but including the ability to register, access, download, and use from different app stores in different countries and for different end-users. From this large-scale analysis, we developed a new advisory tool for software developers of emerging apps to avoid many of the wide accessibility issues presented in these COVID-19 apps. A user evaluation of our prototype tool with 13 real-world app developers indicates it will assist developers to address many of these issues prior to initial emerging app deployment.
ABSTRACT
Many people around the world are worried about using or even downloading COVID-19 contact tracing mobile apps. The main reported concerns are centered around privacy and ethical issues. At the same time, people are voluntarily using Social Media apps at a significantly higher rate during the pandemic without similar privacy concerns compared with COVID-19 apps. To better understand these seemingly anomalous behaviours, we analysed the privacy policies, terms & conditions and data use agreements of the most commonly used COVID-19, Social Media & Productivity apps. We also developed a tool to extract and analyse nearly 2 million user reviews for these apps. Our results show that Social Media & Productivity apps actually have substantially higher privacy and ethical issues compared with the majority of COVID-19 apps. Surprisingly, lots of people indicated in their user reviews that they feel more secure as their privacy are better handled in COVID-19 apps than in Social Media apps. On the other hand, most of the COVID-19 apps are less accessible and stable compared to most Social Media apps, which negatively impacted their store ratings and led users to uninstall COVID-19 apps more frequently. Our findings suggest that in order to effectively fight this pandemic, health officials and technologists will need to better raise awareness among people about COVID-19 app behaviour and trustworthiness. This will allow people to better understand COVID-19 apps and encourage them to download and use these apps. Moreover, COVID-19 apps need many accessibility enhancements to allow a wider range of users from different societies and cultures to access to these apps.