Tales From the Past: Adapting App Repositories to App Store Dynamics

The pervasiveness of smartphones in daily life has enabled the transformation of health care services into digital services, often offered as mobile apps to make them more accessible to the general public. The steady increase of apps in the app stores, in turn, led to the creation of app repositories to help end users, physicians, therapists, and healthcare providers find high- quality apps based on expert app ratings. However, the validity of these ratings is linked to a specific app version. In this paper, we aim to describe the problems of current app repositories and present an approach to address these shortcomings. More specifically, our approach is able to periodically monitor the two major proprietary app stores and react to upcoming changes. We furthermore present a mechanism to extract additional information from Android apps and to automate the latter procedure. Finally, our paper aims to stimulate discussion on what additional tools app researchers need to better study app quality and execution.