Market-level Analysis of Government-backed COVID-19 Contact Tracing Apps
This research identifies user-centric issues in COVID-19 contact tracing apps, aiming to improve their quality and adoption for public health authorities.
This study conducted the first market-level analysis of government-backed COVID-19 contact tracing apps, examining eight iOS apps over four months. It characterized app release practices, popularity, and user feedback, revealing various issues from the user's perspective.
To help curb the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, governments and public health authorities around the world have launched a number of contact-tracing apps. Although contact tracing apps have received extensive attentions from the research community, no existing work has characterized the users' adoption of contact tracing apps from the app market level. In this work, we perform the first market-level analysis of contact tracing apps. We perform a longitudinal empirical study (over 4 months) of eight government-backed COVID-19 contact tracing apps in iOS app store. We first collect all the daily meta information (e.g., app updates, app rating, app comments, etc.) of these contact tracing apps from their launch to 2020-07-31. Then we characterize them from release practice, app popularity, and mobile users' feedback. Our study reveals various issues related to contact tracing apps from the users' perspective, hoping to help improve the quality of contact tracing apps and thus achieving a high level of adoption in the population.