Growth in the development of health and fitness mobile apps amid COVID-19 pandemic

OBJECTIVES: Technology in the form of mobile apps has played an essential role in facilitating, tracking, and maintaining health and fitness activities during the pandemic. When countries opted for partial or complete lockdowns to contain the spread of the coronavirus disease 2019 virus, it led to people working on their health and fitness-related activities from their homes, just as they continued working from home. This paper aims to quantify the impact of coronavirus disease 2019 on the development of health and fitness mobile apps. Specifically, we compute the effect of coronavirus disease 2019 on the growth of different sub-categories of health and fitness apps. METHODS: We scraped data about a population of 78,890 health and fitness apps from the iOS App Store. First, categories of health and fitness apps are identified using text analysis on the descriptions of apps. Second, the rise in the development of new apps is analyzed. To quantify the impact of coronavirus disease 2019 on the growth of the health and fitness apps, multiple time-series forecasting models are created for different categories of health and fitness apps. RESULTS: The text analysis identified twelve different types of health and fitness apps on the app market. Our models estimated that the number of health and fitness apps on the iOS app market exceeded the expected growth by 29.9% after the pandemic. The results of all categories of health and fitness are discussed in the paper. CONCLUSIONS: Our analysis found significant growth in the development of new health and fitness apps after the pandemic outbreak. The post hoc study of the population of health and fitness apps presented the current state of this particular area of the app market. In addition, it provided potential growth areas in app markets where there are fewer apps.