Flo, Calm, and MyFitnessPal are the most popular health apps in the world in 2020, according to the Health App Index from Uswitch, a UK-based comparison website. Half of mobile app users relied on health and fitness apps in order to achieve their fitness goals before the pandemic. That number rose to 75% after the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak. 

The index gathered data from the Apple App Store, search engine optimization company Ahrefs, and analytics company SimilarWeb from December 12 to 20, 2020, to find out the world’s most popular health apps. 

To determine a seed list to use, Uswitch took the top 20 free health apps from the Apple App Store in 20 countries and gathered the 15 most popular apps across each. These apps were analyzed using their average app store ranking, yielding a list of the most popular apps, and then scored 1 to 15 based on their ranking, with 15 being the highest.

Flo, a period tracker used by more than 153 million women worldwide to monitor their menstrual cycle, scored 15 points and ranks in the top 10 in the app store of every country indexed by Uswitch, apart from Austria. 

Meditation app Calm’s popularity increased after mental health became a global issue. It scored 14 out of a possible 15, and is most popular in Ireland, Luxembourg, and the UK. 

MyFitnesPal, meanwhile, topped the weight management category. Among all the apps studied in the index, it also emerged as having the largest quantity of collected user data.

Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States, and New Zealand are the countries that are most interested in health apps, Uswitch’s data also revealed. 

In the Philippines, Fitbit was the most popular health app according to Ahrefs’s search volume data, as fitness was found to be the top health concern for Filipinos. — Patricia B. Mirasol

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