Abstract
Despite the ubiquity of smartphone ownership and the increasing integration of social engagement features in smoking cessation apps to engage users, the social and non-social engagement features that are present in current smoking cessation apps and the effectiveness of these features in engaging users remain understudied. To fill the gap in the literature, a content analysis of free and paid smoking cessation mobile apps was conducted to examine (a) the presence of social features (i.e., social support, social announcement, and social referencing) and non-social engagement features (e.g., personal environmental changes, goal setting, progress tracking, reinforcement tracking, self-monitoring, and personalized recommendations) and (b) their relationships with user engagement scores measured by the Mobile App Rating Scale. In this study, 28.2% of the smoking cessation apps enable social announcement and 8.1% offered the social support feature. Only two apps provided a social referencing feature (1.3%). No app included reinforcement tracking, with the percentage of other non-social engagement features ranging from 9.4% to 49.0%. Social support (β = 0.30, p < 0.001), social announcement (β = 0.21, p < 0.05), and social referencing (β = 0.18, p < 0.05) were significant predictors of user engagement. Regarding the non-social engagement features, personal environment changes (β = 0.38, p < 0.001), progress tracking (β = 0.18, p < 0.05), and personalized recommendations (β = 0.37, p < 0.001) significantly predicted user engagement. The findings not only contribute to the mobile communication literature by applying and extending the theory-based mobile health apps engagement typology, but also inform the future architecture design of smoking cessation mobile apps.
Highlights
Of the current smoking cessation apps, 74 (49.7%) offered tracking function, 58 (38.9%) incorporated at least a calculator, 43 (28.9%) included the hypnosis, 30 (20.1%)
By conducting a comprehensive content analysis of free and paid smoking cessation apps, this study answered two primary research questions: (a) what social engagement features are present in smoking cessation apps and (b) how effective they are in potentially engaging users
And beyond depicting the landscape of engagement features applied by existing smoking cessation mobile apps, the current study identified the effectiveness of engaging smokers by theory-based features, including social support, friendly competition, progress tracking, and personalization, showing consistency with previous studies [13,60]
Summary
Krebs and Duncan [2] documented from a national survey that
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