Document is current

Article History

Received: 7 March 2025

Accepted: 10 August 2025

First Online: 30 September 2025

Declarations

:

: Detailed data on how much and when people are using the specific apps on their phones must be collected, stored, analysed and reported on in a sensitive and safe way. In consideration of this, data collected on people’s usage of the apps in question was gathered by a third party company who specialise in exactly this problem. Furthermore, in agreeing to submit this data, participants are made aware of their legal rights with respect to the data sharing and are remunerated for the data that they provide. They are also free to opt-out of the data collection process at any time. In light of the potential sensitivity of this data, we only analysed data pertaining to the apps we asked the participants about, and only researchers who were directly analysing the data had access to it.In gathering the SHRI survey data, we provided each participant with a form explaining what the answers would be used for and providing them with a way to contact the researchers for more information, or to terminate the survey at any point if they were unhappy with it.Furthermore, we received ethical approval from a University ethics committee prior to beginning our research.

: When this study was initially carried out, M.S. and M.B. both worked for Spotify. While not a focus of the study, Spotify can reasonably be thought of as a competitor to some of the services listed. All analysis and data is shared with the reviewers (and with readers, upon request) and so our findings and our methods are replicable. We deliberately didn’t include Spotify as a focus app in order to mitigate the perceived conflict of interest.