Study Mobile Users’ Reactions to the COVID-19 Pandemic Through the Lens of App Popularity

Introduction

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly influenced people’s life around the world, including how they interact with mobile technologies. In this paper, we seek to develop an understanding of how a dynamic trajectory of pandemic development shape mobile phone users experience with their phones. Through the lens of app popularity, we approach this research goal from a cross-country perspective, which allows us to understand, characterize, and compare the dynamics of app popularity under country-specific pandemic development trajectories. We compile a dataset consisting of six-month daily snapshots of most popular apps in iOS App Store in China and the US where the pandemic exhibit distinct development trajectories. Using this longitudinal dataset, our analysis provides detailed patterns and evolution laws of app ranking during the pandemic at both category and individual app levels. Moreover, our work further reveals app-categories’ rankings are correlated with the pandemic, contingent upon country-specific pandemic development trajectories. Our work offers rich insights into how the COVID-19 pandemic, a typical global public health crisis, influence people’s day-to-day interaction with Internet and mobile technologies.

For more details see Link.