Understanding University Students’ Experiences with mHealth Apps for Stress Management: A Thematic Summary

This study explored university students’ experiences with mobile health (mHealth) applications designed for stress management, using a qualitative dataset of open-ended responses. Through initial coding and thematic analysis, three overarching themes emerged: Engagement and Usage Patterns, Emotional and Psychological Responses, and Trust, Privacy, and Technical Reliability.

Students described inconsistent engagement with stress-management apps, noting that academic workload often disrupted routine use. Features such as reminders, user-friendly interfaces, and short exercises supported consistency, while lack of perceived benefit or overly long sessions discouraged continued use. These insights suggest that practical usability factors strongly shape whether students integrate mHealth tools into their daily lives.

The second theme highlighted the emotional dimension of app interaction. Participants reported both positive experiences, such as feeling calmer, supported, or motivated by progress tracking, and negative reactions, including feeling judged, bored, or uncomfortable with self-disclosure. This range of emotional responses underscores that the success of mHealth tools depends not only on functionality but also on how users emotionally relate to them.

A final theme centred on issues of trust, privacy, and technical performance. Students expressed concerns about data security and confusing privacy policies, indicating that uncertainty about personal information handling undermines confidence. Technical problems including crashes, intrusive ads, and poor personalisation further weakened trust and often hindered long-term adoption. These challenges reveal the importance of reliability and transparency in digital health technologies.

Reflecting on the analytic process, the group found it challenging to determine which codes were most relevant, as many responses overlapped across themes. Interpreting the data required negotiation, multiple readings, and careful attention to avoid imposing assumptions. Despite these difficulties, the analysis was valuable in demonstrating how thematic methods uncover rich behavioural and emotional insights that quantitative approaches may overlook.

Overall, the thematic analysis provides a nuanced understanding of how students perceive, engage with, and evaluate mHealth apps for stress management, offering important considerations for improving digital mental-health design and implementation.