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
The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way we live, leading to a rapid expansion of mHealth apps usage. The pandemic also led to the introduction of a large number of "emerging apps"to the mobile app market. mHealth and emerging app users have reported a range of serious issues in their user reviews, which we identified and better understood after extracting, translating, analysing and classifying over 6 millions user reviews of these apps into different aspects. As evidenced by user reviews, many mHealth and emerging apps are plagued by major issues and problems. App developers could improve the quality and adoption of their apps if they had a better grasp of the major concerns raised by their users. We also link the findings from our user review analysis to the app version history release notes to better understand and identify what issues the developers of mHealth/emerging apps managed to solve or not. Investigating the association between user reviews and app updates will allow us to design a model for mHealth/emerging app developers to follow. We identified that our recommendation models and tools can assist mHealth/emerging app developers and designers in proactively identifying and preventing software and design issues before their final apps are deployed to mobile users. A proactive evaluation model and discovering mHealth/emerging issues early can save billions of dollars and avert millions of deaths a year. As a result, more people will download these apps when they believe that the updates are actually addressing and solving their problems, which will result in saving lives and improving the quality of life for people with disabilities or those who use these apps. © 2022 ACM.