An evaluation of mobile applications designed to assist service members and veterans transitioning to civilian life

Mobile technologies may be able to provide service members and veterans with the knowledge necessary to transition to civilian life successfully in a cost-effective and accessible manner. Although a number of transition applications (apps) currently exist in the marketplace, to our knowledge, none of them has been evaluated for quality or effectiveness. For this study, 6 experts used the Mobile App Rating Scale (MARS; Stoyanov et al., 2015) to evaluate the quality of 16 transition apps. The majority of these apps focused on providing service members with resource lists, employment assistance, or assistance with disability applications. Only 2 apps had been downloaded more than 10,000 times on GooglePlay, with the majority being downloaded between 100 and 1,000 times. Only 1 app received an above-average overall quality rating, and half received below-average overall quality ratings. Based on these findings, the authors recommend that researchers and developers create more high-quality apps by focusing on education and health-care transition issues, as well as work to better disseminate their products. (PsycINFO Database Record