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The Effects of COVID-19 on Mobile App Usage

How have social distancing restrictions influenced customers' uses of mobile applications ("apps") during the Covid-19 pandemic? In this research, we examine a proprietary data set that contains usage information from around 280 mobile apps between January 2019 and July 2020 in 30 major Chinese cities. We find that the effect of social distancing policy on the number of active users depends on the nature of the app. Using regression discontinuity in time (RDiT), we find that social distancing policy increased the number of active users by an average of 21% across all apps. We stratify the data by two primary app categories: Life Service apps (which involve offline human-human or human-product contact), and Virtual Service apps (which involve no offline contact), and find that within the Life Service category, social distancing policy helped popular/independent apps the most (72% increase in the number of active users), followed by niche/independent apps, while hurt popular/platform apps and niche/platform apps. For apps in the Virtual Service category, niche/independent apps and popular/platform apps benefited the most from social distancing policy, ranging roughly from 12% to 54%. Furthermore, we find that in cities with higher density and more migrants (vs. cities with lower density and fewer migrants), the number of active users increased by 37% and 34% (vs. 8% and 11%) respectively. The results support two underlying mechanisms of social distancing policy: social deprivation (i.e., the feeling of being deprived of social interactions) and offline risk (i.e., the risk of exposure to the coronavirus).