Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic led to a multi-faceted global crisis, which triggered the diverse and quickly emerging use of old and new digital tools. We have developed a multi-channel approach for the monitoring and analysis of a subset of such tools, the COVID-19 related mobile applications (apps). Our approach builds on the information available in the two most prominent app stores (i.e., Google Play for Android-powered devices and Apple’s App Store for iOS-powered devices), as well as on relevant tweets and digital media outlets. The dataset presented here is one of the outcomes of this approach, uses the content of the app stores and enriches it, providing aggregated information about 837 mobile apps published across the world to fight the COVID-19 crisis. This information includes: (a) information available in the mobile app stores between 20 April 2020 and 2 August 2020; (b) complementary information obtained from manual analysis performed until mid-September 2020; and (c) status information about app availability on 28 February 2021, when we last collected data from the mobile app stores. We highlight our findings with a series of descriptives, which depict both the activities in the app stores and the qualitative information that was revealed by the manual analysis.
Highlights
2020; and (c) status information about app availability on 28 February 2021, when we last collected data from the mobile app stores
We have developed an approach for the monitoring and analysis of the COVID19 related mobile apps [7], which builds on the information available in the two most prominent app stores
The relevant app store contents were analysed daily, and the data retrieved were processed once a week; this way, we developed a database of relevant mobile apps together with the metadata describing them
Summary
The COVID-19 pandemic led to a multi-faceted global crisis, which triggered the diverse and quickly emerging use of old and new digital tools. Privacy, personal data protection, use of data for social good [4] and trust from the citizens were the concerns To address the latter, relevant work on COVID-19 apps was conducted by few groups resulting in app classifications based on different criteria. The relevant app store contents were analysed daily, and the data retrieved were processed once a week; this way, we developed a database of relevant mobile apps together with the metadata describing them. This information was complemented with the results of the manual analysis that we performed, in order to get some descriptives on the COVID-19 mobile apps landscape.
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