BACKGROUND The best manner to prevent suicide is to recognize suicidal signs and signals, and know how to respond to them. OBJECTIVE We aim to study the existing mobile apps for suicide prevention in the literature and the most commonly used virtual stores. METHODS Two reviews were carried out. The first was done by searching the most commonly used commercial app stores, which are iTunes an...

User’s continuance intention is vital to the future of mobile social apps (i.e. applications) with rapid development and intensive competitions among their providers. We draw on the theory of flow experience and switching cost to build an integrated model to explain factors influencing users’ continuance using intention. Our model is tested by survey and Structural Equation Model (SEM) in the m...

This paper introduces a new real-time air pollution alert system using mobile devices. Through the location awareness capability of mobile devices, Androidand iOS-based apps are developed to inform the public residing in the vicinity of air pollution areas. The apps have shown to be working successfully sending push notifications as well as a regional map to convey the air pollution information...

Smartphones have revolutionized mobile computing, but have created concerns that many third-party mobile applications do not properly handle users’ privacy-sensitive data. In this paper, we propose AppInspector, an automated privacy validation system that analyzes apps and generates reports of potential privacy risks. A key insight is that distinguishing acceptable disclosures from privacy viol...

In recent years, a market of games and learning apps for children has flourished in the mobile world. Many of these often “free” mobile apps have access to a variety of sensitive personal information about the user, which app developers can monetize via advertising or other means. In the United States, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) protects children’s privacy, requiring p...

BACKGROUND The rapid growth in the use of mobile phone applications (apps) provides the opportunity to increase access to evidence-based mental health care. OBJECTIVE Our goal was to systematically review the research evidence supporting the efficacy of mental health apps for mobile devices (such as smartphones and tablets) for all ages. METHODS A comprehensive literature search (2008-2013)...

A critical challenge faced by mobile app developers today is to effectively manage their app portfolio, but this issue has rarely been addressed in the IS academic literature. To address this gap, we focus on the impact of category assortment of developers’ app portfolios on their performance. Specifically, we evaluate both the supply and demand of mobile apps with a data set from the Apple App...

Mobile health (m-health) apps can bring health prevention and promotion to the general population. The main purpose of this article is to analyze different m-health apps for a broad spectrum of consumers by means of three different experiences. This goal was defined following the strategic documents generated by the main prospective observatories of Information and Communications Technology for...

The growth of the smart devices market and the development of mobile applications (Apps) for them have given rise to an App economy. Sales of mobile applications are a key revenue source in this economy, with the expected worldwide market growth of US $75 billion by 2017. Despite the trend, many mobile Apps fail to attract customers, yet there has been a lack of research and understanding of th...