There are well over 3,000 apps in the “medical” section of the App Store for the iPhone. Unfortunately, a growing number of them aren’t medical apps. It’s already difficult enough to parse through the litany of apps available to find quality apps – and then when you add apps that shouldn’t even be in the medical category, it makes the job that much harder.
Lets start with the “top 10 downloaded free iphone medical apps” in the App Store. Notice how the word “downloaded” is in bold. By no means do we think these apps are the best free iphone medical apps – we’ve already chronicled that list in another post.
These are the top 10 downloaded free medical apps in the App Store: Medscape, Sex-Facts, Epocrates, Medpage Today, Marijuana Truth, iAugment, Dream Meaning, Medical Encyclopedia, Body Systems – Anatomy Quiz, and Best Diet foods. Note, Medscape, Epocrates, and Medpage Today are extremely legitimate apps – they even made our top 10 free iphone medical apps list. Sex-Facts, Marijuana Truth, iAugment, Dream Meaning, and Best diet foods will never make any top 10 list of ours.
By our calculations, 12 of the top 25 downloaded medical apps, 48 percent, are mis-categorized and should not be in the medical section. So we looked into this a bit further.
What about the “paid” medical apps section. Surely the paid section would be more populated with apps in the right section – and it was. But again, some very odd choices for “medical apps”. Emergency radio, the 6th most downloaded paid medical app, and Police radio, the 17th most downloaded paid medical app, should clearly not be in the medical section of the App Store. It seems as if the developers threw in the word “EMT”, and Apple figured it sounded “medical enough”.
It’s not as if these apps don’t have other sections they could go in. There are 20 other categories in the App Store, and the apps I mentioned at the beginning could clearly go into the healthcare section.
As the App Store continues to grow at a rapid rate, it would be great if Apple did some housekeeping, and fixed its categories, or at least defined them better. The longer they let apps that shouldn’t belong in the medical section blossom, the more cumbersome the process of going through the apps becomes. Let’s hope this happens sooner than later.
I agree; this is a problem for everyone, especially for the small developers who wants to get a little more exposure in the Store.
Actually, when we (developers) submit an app to Apple for review, we decide which category it goes in. I really don’t think Apple reviews this up front (they might if they get a user complain); as a matter of fact, we can change the category of an app “on the fly” in iTunes Connect (developers platform). When reviewing an app, Apple just want to make sure that: it’s not a virus, it doesn’t run a un-allowed code (Flash
), it’s (relatively) stable, and it’s not porn; they don’t really look at the general content of the app.
Another important point is marketing. With around 250 000 apps on the Store, some developers release their app and get a big 0 download. The best way of getting noticed in the AppStore is 1 – getting featured by Apple (front page of the Store): that is by “luck” only; developers can’t pay to buy a spot there. 2 – getting in the top 100 (now 200) of a category. The medical section of the store is the least popular, so it’s relatively easier to get in the top 200. Once you’re there, the app gets the extra exposure and it tends to stay there for some time, even if it’s not really a “medical app”
Solution? I don’t really know. I think it will be up to us (in the medical field) to flag Apple about this kind of abuse, although it will be tough to draw a line…
my 2 cents
wow. i’m shocked that such a stringent approval process has such a lax policy when it comes to categories, but it explains why so many apps are in the medical category that shouldn’t be.
it’s funny how at the end of the day, this happens because of market forces.
It is amazing how many apps sneak into the medical category.
Our research found 10.11 percent of apps in the Medical Category are mis-categorized. This was not based on a sample size — we looked at every single app in the category and made the call based on the app’s focus.
Our recent report, The World of Health and Medical Apps, has more here: http://mobihealthnews.com/rese…
What’s also interesting is that more than 33 percent of apps in the medical category are intended for use by consumers, not healthcare professionals — the group that the “medical” category was created for.
Brian Dolan
Editor, MobiHealthNews.com
Thank you for for the interesting information and the link to the paid report. While we are obviously more interested in apps for physicians, clearly the bigger market is consumer directed wellness applications. Perhaps some developers are placing their apps in the Medical category instead of the Healthcare and Fitness category to boost perceived legitimacy. It is probably unrealistic to expect Apple to police this.