Investigating the relationship between user ratings and gamification - A review of mHealth apps in the apple App Store and Google play store

Abstract

Gamification of mHealth apps is regarded as a promising approach to counteract decreasing long-term motivation of mHealth app users. Although gamification has received tremendous attention from researchers interested in mHealth apps, little is known about the extent to which gamification is used in real world mHealth apps today and whether the implementation of gamification actually pays off for app developers by, for example, positively influencing user ratings. Within this research, we investigate the implementation of game mechanics for 1,000 apps from the Apple App Store and Google Play Store as well as the potential relationship between the degree of gamification of mHealth apps and their user ratings. While our results highlight a high degree of adoption of gamification for both app stores, they also indicate a positive relationship between the degree of gamification of an mHealth app and user ratings for the Apple App Store only.