I have a very general question about Avicenna updates. There are many app updates that are regularly done, and for these you need to go to Play/App store and click ‘Update’.
What I’ve realized is that participants only get prompted to update their study if there are study-specific changes, so not app-level updates. So I imagine participants may miss many app updates like this and it’s not ideal.
Do you know how to overcome this? Is there the only option for me to manually notify participants regularly to update their app?
The app-level update is managed by Google Play / Apple’s App Store, which as you mentioned is different than the updates to the study configuration.
When you make a change in study configuration, Avicenna immediately contacts the phone and updates the settings, behind the scenes. This is unlike Google Play/Apple App Store updates that waits for user’s update approval. You can also force the update/refresh of study configuration on participant’s device by reloading their study.
There are some cases that either the participant’s app is dead or he/she is offline, or similar cases, that the study configuration update does not go through (not common though). In this case, you can ask participant to open the app and press Reload Studies from Server to initiate this update.
Thanks a lot for the timely response, and this makes perfect sense.
Just to clarify a bit more what my worry is:
Essentially, I am afraid that during the study period, there will be Avicenna-app level updates (i.e., the ones for which the participant needs to go manually go to the App store to update) to prevent some bugs. I think it is very unlikely that the participant will ever think of going to the App store to check if there are any updates available and update the app. Therefore, it seems that it is up to us to remind them.
Because these app updates are typically quite important, would you advice me to proceed in a specific way? Should we check every time there is an Avicenna app update and then notify all the participants to manually update the app? Just to clarify, here I only refer to Avicenna app updates, not study updates, which as you mentioned they get notified right away to update, so they can’t miss that.
I would not be worried about this for two reasons:
Our app update is often to either resolve edge-case bugs, or add new functionalities. So they are often not “critical updates”. It would be fine even if participant does not apply the update for a few days or weeks.
Almost all devices are configured to update their apps on a regular basis. So when we release an update to the Store, it will be sent to all devices within a few days to a week.
Let me know if you still have other concerns and I will help.