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Market-level analysis of government-backed COVID-19 contact tracing apps

Published: 22 January 2021 Publication History

Abstract

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.

References

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Contact tracing. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/daily-life-coping/contact-tracing.html, 2020.
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Ren He, Haoyu Wang, Pengcheng Xia, Liu Wang, Yuanchun Li, Lei Wu, Yajin Zhou, Xiapu Luo, Yao Guo, and Guoai Xu. Beyond the virus: A first look at coronavirus-themed mobile malware. arXiv preprint arXiv:2005.14619, 2020.
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Stacy Hobson, Michael Hind, Aleksandra Mojsilovic, and Kush R. Varshney. Trust and transparency in contact tracing applications. arXiv preprint arXiv:2006.11356, 2020.
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Tianshi Li, Jackie, Yang, Cori Faklaris, Jennifer King, Yuvraj Agarwal, Laura Dabbish, and Jason I. Hong. Decentralized is not risk-free: Understanding public perceptions of privacy-utility trade-offs in covid-19 contact-tracing apps. arXiv preprint arXiv:2005.11957, 2020.
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Cited By

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  • (2023)Not Only for Contact TracingProceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies10.1145/35703486:4(1-26)Online publication date: 11-Jan-2023
  • (2022)Engineering Mobile Apps for Disaster Management: The Case of COVID-19 Apps in the Google Play StoreIEEE Software10.1109/MS.2021.312997839:3(31-42)Online publication date: May-2022
  • (2022)Analysing app reviews for software engineering: a systematic literature reviewEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-021-10065-727:2Online publication date: 20-Jan-2022
  • Show More Cited By

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        cover image ACM Conferences
        ASE '20: Proceedings of the 35th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering
        September 2020
        195 pages
        ISBN:9781450381284
        DOI:10.1145/3417113
        Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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        Published: 22 January 2021

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        View all
        • (2023)Not Only for Contact TracingProceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies10.1145/35703486:4(1-26)Online publication date: 11-Jan-2023
        • (2022)Engineering Mobile Apps for Disaster Management: The Case of COVID-19 Apps in the Google Play StoreIEEE Software10.1109/MS.2021.312997839:3(31-42)Online publication date: May-2022
        • (2022)Analysing app reviews for software engineering: a systematic literature reviewEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-021-10065-727:2Online publication date: 20-Jan-2022
        • (2022)Why Do People Not Install Corona-Warn-App? Evidence from Social MediaInformation Systems10.1007/978-3-030-95947-0_21(305-318)Online publication date: 16-Feb-2022
        • (2022)Citizen's adoption intention toward contact tracing apps: An analysis using innovation resistance theoryJournal of Public Affairs10.1002/pa.284423:1Online publication date: 26-Sep-2022
        • (2021)COVID-19 Contact Tracing Apps Data Management and Privacy Policy: A Systematic Review and Content Analysis (Preprint)JMIR mHealth and uHealth10.2196/35195Online publication date: 24-Nov-2021

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