Design insights from the landscape of sustainability apps

Mobile applications serve as essential tools for supporting sustainable behaviour change. This work investigates the current landscape of sustainability-related mobile applications and explores how their design strategies influence user engagement, ethical perception, and behavioural motivation. App developers can receive valuable design insights through user experience analysis and digital sustainability principles to support their work. The research investigates this topic through a mixed-methods exploratory methodology. The researcher selected 54 sustainability applications from the Google Play Store by combining thematic criteria with interaction-based criteria. The sustainability-focused mobile applications fell into categories based on their interaction mechanisms), environmental focus aligned with the global SDGs for enhancing the understanding and value of these themes, and, lastly, user review accessibility. The VADER model performed sentiment analysis to quantify the overall user satisfaction patterns found in reviews. Latent Dirichlet Allocation was used to perform topic modelling to identify fundamental user concerns and underlying themes within the data. The research methods enabled the evaluation of how app features such as gamification, personalization, content transparency, etc., influence user perception, as well as sustain their engagement. The research demonstrates that apps achieve success beyond basic informative content and surface-level gamified features. Users seek apps that offer straightforward interfaces, integrated with motivational content that connects abstract sustainability targets to specific daily activities, also preserving a decent performance. This research contributes to the growing field of digital sustainability by bridging the gap between app design and user expectation, offering a holistic perspective on how mobile technologies support sustainable living.