Mobile Apps to Fight the COVID-19 Crisis

Chrisa Tsinaraki, Irena Mitton, Marco Minghini, Marina Micheli, Alexander Kotsev, Lorena Hernandez Quiros, Fabiano-Antonio Spinelli, Alessandro Dalla Benetta and Sven Schade
Additional contact information
Chrisa Tsinaraki: Joint Research Centre (JRC), European Commission, 21027 Ispra, Italy
Irena Mitton: MITGIS, 52210 Rovinj, Croatia
Marco Minghini: Joint Research Centre (JRC), European Commission, 21027 Ispra, Italy
Marina Micheli: Joint Research Centre (JRC), European Commission, 21027 Ispra, Italy
Alexander Kotsev: Joint Research Centre (JRC), European Commission, 21027 Ispra, Italy
Lorena Hernandez Quiros: Joint Research Centre (JRC), European Commission, 21027 Ispra, Italy
Fabiano-Antonio Spinelli: GFT Italia SRL, 20139 Milano, Italy
Alessandro Dalla Benetta: Piksel SRL, 20126 Milano, Italy
Sven Schade: Joint Research Centre (JRC), European Commission, 21027 Ispra, Italy

Data, 2021, vol. 6, issue 10, 1-11

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.

Keywords: mobile apps; COVID-19; personal data; privacy; contact tracing; GPS; bluetooth; geographic coverage; app store; Google Play (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C8 C80 C81 C82 C83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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