Hensher et al¹ offer an impressive review of the app evaluation space. The scope and depth of their review is a boon to the literature, with great applicability across diverse health domains. However, one concern is that the authors may fall prey to the same issues that they seek to caution readers about. The authors note in the discussion that outcomes of app evaluation systems without scoring “often seemed to be subjective” in a clear subjective statement for which they offer no supporting results or citations. The authors cite our team’s 2018 review article to support their claim that “consistent with previous studies, which highlight the importance of point-scale approach,” which is odd, as this is neither the message nor the conclusion that we wrote in that article cited. Rather, we noted that “perhaps point-based evaluation will be more useful in the near future” after reviewing a lack of consensus and convergence in these point based approaches.² In this same cited article, we illustrate the merits of a pyramid-based framework developed in conjunction with the American Psychiatric Association,^3,4 which the authors suggest might “reduce the credibility and validity of the evaluation process” for reasons that are not explained. There are many approaches to app evaluation, and each holds merit, but without a discussion based on facts there cannot be progress.

中文翻译：

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致编辑：可操作的移动健康评估的新方法

亨舍等人¹对应用程序评估空间提供令人印象深刻的评论。他们审查的范围和深度对文献来说是一个福音，在不同的健康领域具有很大的适用性。然而，一个担忧是作者可能会成为他们试图提醒读者注意的相同问题的牺牲品。作者在讨论中指出，没有评分的应用程序评估系统的结果在明确的主观陈述中“通常似乎是主观的”，他们没有提供支持结果或引用。作者引用了我们团队 2018 年的评论文章来支持他们的说法，即“与之前的研究一致，这些研究强调了点尺度方法的重要性”，这很奇怪，因为这既不是我们在引用的那篇文章中所写的信息也不是结论. 相当，²在同一篇引用的文章中，我们阐述了与美国精神病学协会合作开发的基于金字塔的框架的优点，^{3 , 4}作者建议可能“降低评估过程的可信度和有效性”，原因并非如此解释了。应用评价的方法有很多，各有各的优点，但没有实事求是的讨论就没有进展。