China News Service, Beijing, December 8th (China News Finance reporter Xie Yiguan) On December 8th, the China Consumers Association released the "Research Report on the Supervision and Evaluation Project of Aging App Consumption". The current situation is generally satisfactory; nearly half of elderly consumers urgently need apps for the elderly; small fonts, many advertisements, and pop-up windows are difficult to close.

The "digital divide" facing the elderly is becoming increasingly prominent

　　According to official statistics, as of the end of 2021, my country's population aged 60 and over accounted for 18.9% of the total population, those aged 65 and over accounted for 14.2% of the total population, and the number of elderly Internet users aged 60 and over reached 119 million.

　　However, due to physical and psychological changes, many elderly people do not know how to surf the Internet or use smart phones. They encounter inconvenience in daily life such as travel, medical treatment, and consumption, and cannot fully enjoy the convenience brought by intelligent services. The problem of "digital divide" facing people has become increasingly prominent.

　　In 2020, the General Office of the State Council issued the "Notice on the Implementation Plan to Effectively Solve the Difficulties of the Elderly in Using Smart Technology", which clearly proposed to promote the aging transformation of mobile Internet applications (APP).

　　The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has also issued a number of policies successively, and will implement the "Special Action for Internet Application Adaptation to Aging and Barrier-Free Transformation" from January 2021.

It is understood that a total of 648 websites and APPs have passed the aging and barrier-free transformation and evaluation.

Survey: 76% of mobile APPs meet the basic requirements for aging transformation

　　In 2022, the China Consumers Association will organize a special survey to evaluate and investigate the status quo of relevant companies promoting mobile phone APP (hereinafter referred to as APP) for aging, and draw 7 main conclusions:

　　First, among the 104 commonly used apps evaluated, 76% of the apps meet the basic requirements for aging retrofit, a total of 79 apps have a compliance rate of 75% and above, and 20 apps have a compliance rate of 60%-75%, indicating that large Most APPs can properly take into account the physical and mental characteristics of the elderly in the process of development and design or iterative update, and have taken corresponding measures.

　　Second, catering, shopping, social communication and other apps that have a large audience and serve daily life are leading the aging process. The overall design of catering and shopping, convenient life, social communication, and educational news apps takes the needs of the elderly into consideration. The industry track is relatively mature, the user scale is large, and there is no obvious youthful attribute. The comprehensive compliance rate of the evaluation indicators is above 90%.

　　The third is that APP is more suitable for aging in terms of operability, and the overall compliance rate reaches 92.6%; there is a lot of room for improvement in terms of making it easy for the elderly to understand, with an average compliance rate of only 66.6%, and some APPs should be more suitable for the elderly In terms of physical and mental characteristics in terms of hearing, vision, touch, thinking, and cognition, the compatibility of casual game apps and the safety of audio-visual entertainment apps need to be improved.

　　Fourth, the overall satisfaction of elderly consumers with apps suitable for aging is stable at a relatively high level, and their expectations for safety are still high.

　　Fifth, elderly consumers hope that APPs are more convenient to operate and have practical functions, and more guidance and auxiliary measures should be added.

　　Sixth, the aging-appropriate results in medical health, pension information, etc. are more expected.

In the survey, in response to the demand for APP categories dedicated to the elderly, elderly consumers have the highest expectations for APPs related to medical health and elderly care information.

　　Seventh, the publicity and promotion of APP aging achievements can be further strengthened.

The survey found that some apps still have problems such as the inconvenient search of the embedded interface, the information of the old version is not prominent enough, and the awareness and actual usage rate of the old version of the app are not high.

Nearly half of elderly consumers urgently need dedicated apps

　　The China Consumers Association also found some phenomena during the evaluation and investigation.

For example, 40% of APP's aging-adaptiveness stays in the "point-like" promotion stage.

40.3% of the apps have neither special versions for the elderly nor built-in interfaces suitable for the elderly.

　　Another example is that the security of personal information is guaranteed, but the phenomenon of advertising plug-ins and induced operations has not been completely eliminated, and the contradiction between aging-friendly public welfare and corporate profitability has not yet been resolved.

　　Another example is that elderly consumers can accept new things and do not reject new things on the mobile phone network. Nearly half of elderly consumers urgently need apps for the elderly.

At the same time, the use of smartphones is most affected by physical and mental factors, such as small fonts, many advertisements, and pop-up windows that are difficult to close, etc., which plague elderly consumers.

　　According to the results of this evaluation and survey, China Consumers Association also suggested: improving the supervision mechanism of mobile APPs for aging consumption; speeding up the aging process of APPs in key areas such as medical health, pension information, life payment, and community services; The center's APP aging transformation; promote the sharing of advanced technologies and models for APP aging transformation; strengthen the supervision of APP personal privacy and financial information risks; create an atmosphere of "wanting to surf the Internet, being able to surf the Internet, knowing how to surf the Internet, and daring to surf the Internet".

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