@online{Helmond2019,
title = {Medicate or Meditate; the App Store’s Solutions for Anxiety and Stress},
author = {Anne Helmond and Fernando van der Vlist and Esther Weltevrede and Taylor Geiger and Ine van Zeeland and Ana Pop Stefanija and Fernanda Ibanez and Julia Wolny},
editor = {The Digital Methods Initiative (DMI)},
url = {https://digitalmethods.net/Dmi/SummerSchool2018AppStoresBiasMedicateMeditate},
year = {2019},
date = {2019-01-12},
urldate = {2019-01-12},
abstract = {The number of mobile health (mHealth) apps is rising in an unprecedented manner, and as the American Psychiatric Association notes: “Psychiatry and mental health are no exception, and there are thousands of apps targeting mental health conditions that are directly available for patients to download and use today.” [1] However, there is very little review or oversight for these apps, and as a consequence, users of these apps can receive incorrect or ineffective advice, while the mental health effects of using the apps are often overstated by their developers.
Smartphones are turning into an epistemological device, we turn to them for solutions. When you detect an issue, you turn to your smartphone to find out more. Nearly half of the queries in Google Play Store are broad searches by topic [2] (rather than specific searches for a particular app), showing that users generally turn to their smartphone app store for relevant solutions to broad issues.
When it comes to regular Google search, according to Noble (2018: 155): “In practice, the higher a web page is ranked, the more it is trusted. Unlike the vetting of journalists and librarians, who are entrusted to fact check and curate information for the public according to professional codes of ethics, the legitimacy of websites’ ranking and credibility is simply taken for granted.” Similar to website search results ranking, users accord a certain degree of authority to relevance rankings in app stores, meaning that the order and ranking presented by app stores confers some sort of recommendation to the apps based on the app store’s search results presentation.
In an attempt to make the app store affordances work for them, app developers engage in app store optimization (ASO), trying to end up highly in an app store's search results. With millions of apps available in the bigger app stores, like Google’s (>3 million apps) and Apple’s (>2 million apps), the possibility of a particular app being found is dropping. Common ASO tactics that developers deploy to improve discoverability among millions of other apps, are focused on finding popular keywords to include in the app’s name and subtitle, its ID, and its description.
The growing number of mental health apps, many of which undoubtedly engage in ASO, raises a number of questions: How is mental health represented in the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store? Which solutions does a smartphone user find for mental health issues in these app stores? How do technologists look at the issue of mental health? Which tactics are developers deploying to rank higher? What solutions do they promise and can they deliver? This study addresses these questions by exploring the sphere of mental health apps in the two biggest app stores, focusing on store-mediated ‘relatedness’ between apps and recommendations in the app stores. We glean how the app search engine and how it is manipulated influence what users will find. Lastly, we gauge what kinds of solutions users are presented with when they search for mental health issues.},
keywords = {},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {online}
}