CRII: HCC: RUI: The Systematic Mobile App Review (SMAR) Research Method - A Tool and Guidelines for Understanding the Mobile App Ecosystem

Today, there are millions of mobile apps for education, health, and many other uses. Taking it upon oneself to check all of these apps to make sure they are safe and beneficial is impractical. This project will create a tool for guiding researchers in assessing apps.

The tool is intended to be helpful even to researchers who are not technology experts. As an example, a privacy researcher could use the tool to check which apps need their permissions set in high-risk ways and a mental health researcher could use the tool to find the best apps that support people with depression and follow established clinical guidelines.

Because the tool will provide support for evaluating what an app offers, it will also be useful in improving app design as well as guiding policymaking and providing better recommendations to the public. The overall goal is to make apps more trustworthy and useful for everyone.

This project will create a Systematic Mobile App Review (SMAR) tool. This tool will include detailed guidelines to assist researchers doing app analysis at scale. The research will begin with a systematic review of existing SMAR methods, covering the fields of human-computer interaction and mental health.

The review will identify best practices and gaps in knowledge. Next, the project will engage in action research by communicating with external researchers who are the target users of the tool to better understand their needs. The project team will develop a web-based tool that scrapes data from mobile app stores to identify app permissions and user reviews for different apps.

The tool will format the results it finds into an easy-to-analyze spreadsheet. The project will then promote the SMAR tool and guidelines through publications. The team will conduct training workshops in various research communities.

This project will provide researchers with the tools and knowledge needed to conduct thorough app analyses. The SMAR tool will benefit developers, policymakers, and the public, helping to ensure that mobile apps are safe, effective, and user-friendly.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.