COVID-19 App Store and Data Flow Ecologies
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Warwick
Department Name: Centre for Interdisc. Methodologies
Abstract
Mobile phone applications (apps) have emerged as a key part of the response to COVID-19 around the world and are a feature of UK government plans to manage the 'phase two' transition out of lockdown. While raising concerns from privacy and security to the adoption rates required for their effectiveness, initial research on COVID-19 apps has either remained abstract, been conducted in an ad hoc manner or has targeted individual apps.
This project will make a significant contribution to public and policy debates through digital methods research that will deliver a systematic empirical analysis of: 1) emerging ecologies of COVID-19 apps and their governance through app stores, and; 2) the data flows of prevalent apps within this domain.
Our approach is unique by moving beyond an analysis of single apps to look at multiple apps and their inter-relationships. Critical data studies have demonstrated that a focus on relations between apps and data infrastructures is vital since no apps operate in isolation.
In the first part of the project, the analysis of the Apple App Store and Google Play Store will provide an overview of COVID-19 apps in general. App store governance will be addressed through the investigation of algorithmic and curatorial ordering practices.
In the second part, data flows will be mapped by: capturing the network connections selected significant apps establish with administrative databases and platform APIs; decompiling apps to identify third-parties; and data-focused walkthroughs of app interfaces.
Through these combined methods, the project will provide an assessment of the governance risks and challenges posed to the public by COVID-19 apps.
This project will make a significant contribution to public and policy debates through digital methods research that will deliver a systematic empirical analysis of: 1) emerging ecologies of COVID-19 apps and their governance through app stores, and; 2) the data flows of prevalent apps within this domain.
Our approach is unique by moving beyond an analysis of single apps to look at multiple apps and their inter-relationships. Critical data studies have demonstrated that a focus on relations between apps and data infrastructures is vital since no apps operate in isolation.
In the first part of the project, the analysis of the Apple App Store and Google Play Store will provide an overview of COVID-19 apps in general. App store governance will be addressed through the investigation of algorithmic and curatorial ordering practices.
In the second part, data flows will be mapped by: capturing the network connections selected significant apps establish with administrative databases and platform APIs; decompiling apps to identify third-parties; and data-focused walkthroughs of app interfaces.
Through these combined methods, the project will provide an assessment of the governance risks and challenges posed to the public by COVID-19 apps.
Publications
Dieter M
(2021)
Pandemic platform governance: Mapping the global ecosystem of COVID-19 response apps
in Internet Policy Review
| Description | As a first set of findings, the project has generated new knowledge of how the COVID-19-related apps have emerged as an exceptional niche of software development through specific mechanisms of platform governance - that is, how platform corporations govern and are governed - within the context of the coronavirus pandemic. This includes: - A broad empirical mapping of multiple dimensions of governance mechanisms, including specific changes to app developer guidelines and policies from platform owners; new modes of algorithmic curation for the discoverability of COVID-19-related apps; and the introduction of specific technical resources like new protocols and software code libraries. Our analysis reveals, moreover, distinct differences in how the main app stores - i.e. Google and Apple - have devised and implemented these changes, alongside a broader mapping of differences in how the app space has emerged through these two platforms, including the specific apps available in each; - An analysis of how the exceptionality of the pandemic has seen a suspension by platform owners of the regular economic app activity in this niche of software development to support government actors and other recognised authorities. Platform owners, moreover, have implemented changes to manage 'the infodemic' in restricting the release COVID-19-related apps to expert institutional bodies in alignment with recommendations from the World Health Organization (WHO); - A systematic account of the diversity of COVID-19-related app development across regions and national territories. The project reveals how pandemic apps vary significantly and contain many unique features beyond capacities for digital contact tracing. They can often be, moreover, frequently updated and significantly altered over time. They might facilitate, for example, the provision of official information, symptom checking, quarantine enforcement, the authorization of travel or reporting breaches of lockdown by neighbours. Our study has found in general that while there is a notable tendency toward the use of open source code and minimized data flows, there are nevertheless complex surveillance capacities afforded by these apps that require ongoing critical observation; - Finally, the project demonstrates how platform governance must be considered through a layering of power which unfolds across multiple dimensions. Our findings suggest that power relations between developers and platforms are negotiated and settled differently across these dimensions, even while they frequently appear asymmetric in favor of the latter. Crucially, this has facilitated variation across national and regional domains of COVID-19-related app development, yet still supported an overarching trend toward corporate centralized control and infrastructural entrenchment. A second set of findings from the project makes important contributions to research methods, capacities and resources for app studies. This includes: - The development of new digital methods tools for researching app stores; - The refinement of methodologies for the dynamic, location-specific analysis of app dataflows; - The creation of a curated repository of COVID-19-related apps data used in the project, updated at regular weekly intervals throughout the duration of the project (June-December 2020) to be made available as open access for any future research. |
| Exploitation Route | The account of COVID-19-related apps across platforms and national app stores draws attention to differences between Google and Apple ecosystems, and between countries in their response to the pandemic; aspects of interest to non-academic audiences such as policymakers and regulators, journalists, and the public in evaluating the effectiveness of apps. The empirical account of layered governance mechanisms throughout the COVID-19-related app space within the context of the pandemic crisis makes important contributions to interdisciplinary debates on platform governance and platform economies, while the specific mapping of apps developed for the management of the pandemic is of interest to public health researchers working within the context of ehealth. The development of new tools, methods and resources for analyzing app stores and app dataflows can be utilized and refined by researchers across a range of fields working on app studies, from computer scientists to social scientists, and media and communication scholars, among others. |
| Sectors | Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software),Healthcare,Government, Democracy and Justice |
| Title | Archive.org - COVID-19 Apps |
| Description | The available Android application package (APK) files of the COVID-19 Android apps covered from this project are openly available and preserved in the 'COVID-19_Apps' collection of the Internet Archive. |
| Type Of Material | Database/Collection of data |
| Year Produced | 2021 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | The collection is one of the outcomes of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)/UK Research and Innovation's (UKRI) Rapid Response Grant 'COVID-19 App Store and Data Flow Ecologies' (2020); and is deposited for the (open access) journal article: Dieter, M., Helmond, A., Tkacz, N., van der Vlist, F. N., & Weltevrede, E. (2021). Pandemic platform governance: Mapping the global ecosystem of COVID-19 response apps. Internet Policy Review, 10(3). Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society. https://doi.org/10.14763/2021.3.1568. Visitors to the archive are tracked with over 1,300 unique visitors as the time of this entry. |
| URL | https://archive.org/details/COVID-19_Apps?tab=collection |
| Title | [COVID-19]-related Android (Google Play) and iOS (App Store) app ecosystems |
| Description | This dataset provides information about all the apps that are part of the [COVID-19]-related Android (Google Play) and iOS (App Store) app ecosystems, derived from Google Play (play.google.com) and Apple's App Store (apps.apple.com) between June-July, 2020, and enriched with data from app market data providers App Annie (appannie.com) and AppBrain (appbrain.com). This information includes: (a) details about each Android or iOS app (N = 410 and 253, respectively); (b) version histories for each Android or iOS app from App Annie (N = 4,440 and 2,823 version releases, respectively); (c) details about the software libraries and permissions embedded in each Android app from AppBrain (N = 7,335 software libraries and 2,673 permissions); (d) 'regexmatch' matrices with detected software libraries, permissions, and search terms per app; and (e) (high-resolution) information graphics created from these sources (created with assistance from the DensityDesign Lab at the Polytechnic University of Milan, Italy). The Android application package (APK) files of 256 'editorial' Android apps covered in this study are included in the Internet Archive's 'COVID-19_Apps' collection (archive.org/details/COVID-19_Apps) upon our request. |
| Type Of Material | Database/Collection of data |
| Year Produced | 2021 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | The dataset is one of the outcomes of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)/UK Research and Innovation's (UKRI) Rapid Response Grant 'COVID-19 App Store and Data Flow Ecologies' (2020); and is deposited for the (open access) journal article: Dieter, M., Helmond, A., Tkacz, N., van der Vlist, F. N., & Weltevrede, E. (2021). Pandemic platform governance: Mapping the global ecosystem of COVID-19 response apps. Internet Policy Review, 10(3). Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society. https://doi.org/10.14763/2021.3.1568. |
| URL | https://osf.io/wq3dr/ |
| Title | App Store Scrapers |
| Description | DMI App Store Scrapers essentially consists of two tools: the Google Play Store Scraper and the Apple App Store Scraper. They both define a lightweight Python class that can be used to scrape app information from the two stores. They define a couple of methods that can be used to get relevant app IDs given a set of parameters, and a couple of methods to then scrape data about these app IDs. The tools have been adapted from google-play-scraper and app-store-scraper, nodeJS-based scrapers and then implemented into a web-hosted instance with a GUI to support interdisciplinary research and teaching at different levels of technical expertise. |
| Type Of Technology | Webtool/Application |
| Year Produced | 2020 |
| Open Source License? | Yes |
| Impact | The tool is currently used in two postgraduate teaching programs, one at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies (CIM) at the University of Warwick and another at the new media program at the University of Amsterdam. |
| URL | https://penelope.digitalmethods.net/app-scrapers/ |
| Description | Centre for Digital Inquiry, University of Warwick, UK. TITLE: 'Mapping the COVID-19 App Space' |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | Public talk held online on findings and methods central to the project, followed by a week-long datasprint focussed on capturing data flows and performing walkthroughs of COVID-19 apps. Postgraduate students who attended the later reported a skill acquisition and familiarity with new research techniques, along with an interest in the area of app studies. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2020 |
| URL | https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/cdi/news-events/public_talk_mapping |
| Description | Digital Methods Summer School 2020, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands. TITLE: 'Mapping COVID-19 pandemic response apps.' |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | An initial scoping of COVID-19-related apps through app store research was conducted with postgraduate students and early career researchers at the Digital Methods Summer School at the University of Amsterdam. The workshop took place over a week, and included a general introduction to methods followed by a datasprint and presentation of findings. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2020 |
| URL | https://wiki.digitalmethods.net/Dmi/SummerSchool2020MappingCOVID19Apps |
| Description | Participatory Information Technology (PIT) Summer School 2020, University of Aarhus, Denmark. TITLE: 'Exploring COVID-19 App Ecologies: An Introduction to Multi-Situated App Studies' |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | 60 postgraduate students attended a presentation of the methods utilized in our research project, including scraping app stores and analysing dataflows. An afternoon workshop activity was based on conducting critical walkthroughs of COVID-19 apps, followed by a comparative discussion of findings. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2020 |
| URL | https://pit.au.dk/pit-talks-and-events/summerpit-2020/ |