Analysis of health apps on Google’s Play

Analysis of health apps on Google’s Play

I ran the description of the top 100 Google Play free Android Health & Fitness apps through an online text analyser(http://textalyser.net/)built by Bernhard Huber Internet Engineering Company . The descriptions were collected in the first week of August. I’m not certain how Google ranks these apps as the top 100, but I feel justified looking at them because on the Google Play website for free Health & Fitness apps they are the apps that get displayed when browsing. The 100 top apps have 1,373,910 cumulative reviews.
Here are the interesting results from the text analyser.

Total words 18,076

Complexity factor (Lexical Density) : 21.1%

Readability (Gunning-Fog Index) : (6-easy 20-hard) 7.8

The top ten words used in Health and Fitness app descriptions are; your, you, app, weight, yoga, workout, fitness, free, health, daily

The top ten 3 word phrases; to help you, daily yoga for, based on your, easy to use, allows you to, relax and sleep, so you can, track your progress, minutes a day, personal fitness trainer, guide you through

Interesting tool. Haven’t seen it before.

Can I ask you if you have weighted the descriptions? It seems to me like one or a few apps or descriptions have been given much weight. I say this because I notice that the word yoga and a phrase with yoga, is top listed. Are there really that many yoga apps? Or could it be that one or a few yoga apps have longer descriptions? Or have I misunderstood how you have run the analysis?

8 of the top 100 free Health and Fitness apps in Google Play are for Yoga. I didn’t wiegh each app description for word count when doing the overall content analysis, I’m not sure how I would do that.

When I do this sort of text analysis at work, I generally count how many reports (applications in this case) mention a specific word. That cuts out the overly verbose and/or repetitive texts. You could account for the verbose but not the repetitive by counting each word not as 1, but as 1 / length of the text. You say you don’t know how Google chooses them to be in the top 100. If you did you could use whatever rating score they’re using as another weight.

I went through each app description and coded for two variables; self-tracking and social networking. 49 of the top 100 free Android Health and Fitness apps, on Google Play, involved a form self-tracking. 29 of the apps had a feature that allowed a user to interactively share their results.