The COVID-19 pandemic transformed the methods used by governments and institutions in service delivery by accelerating the adoption of mobile applications. Mobile platforms in areas including healthcare, finance, and the sphere of government played a critical role as the means of remote access and operation throughout lockdowns. Though the process of transition towards the digital platform in most countries had already started, the crisis speed things up significantly and demonstrated its efficiency as well as the major constraints.

With the rise of mobile money, governments worldwide embrace m-Gov services to access government operations. Allow citizens access to services via mobile devices, eliminating the need for physical office visits. This trend of mobile-friendly design increased before COVID-19 H. Salman et al. (2022), and R. Peiris et al. (2021), with governments enforcing mobile platforms to improve services. The pandemic in March 2020 increased the deployment of mobile apps in healthcare, fintech, and public services. Figure 1 illustrates the growth in mobile application usage from 2019 to 2022 across the health, fintech, and public service sectors, with a notable surge during the pandemic years. This sector-wise increase reflects how governments expanded digital service delivery to manage health crises, sustain financial access, and maintain public services remotely.

Mobile apps like mHealth4Afrika, Easy Clinic, and Hello, Dr. enabled remote consultations, health monitoring, and personalised medical advice. In Saudi Arabia, the apps Seha and Tawakkalna provided telemedicine, contact tracing, and vaccination records. Public platforms like MyGov, eCitizen Platform offered digital services, while Absher facilitated ID renewal, visa applications, and traffic fine payments. These apps supported daily life during crises.

In the pandemic, lockdowns and social distancing led to office shutdowns, causing traditional service delivery to be insufficient. Governments respond quickly using user-friendly applications in major sectors. These apps provide service during an era of unprecedented socio-economic transformation.

In this connection, mobile applications became essential aspects of social life, healthcare, and financial stability. They enabled telemedicine, contact tracing, digital wallets, and ensured public service continuity during lockdown. The pandemic highlighted mobile technologies that facilitate resilience while also exposing the opportunities and vulnerabilities of technologies.

This paper examines mobile applications deployed since COVID-19, focusing on healthcare, fintech, and public services. It highlights research findings on the effectiveness, adoption, and challenges of mobile government services to identify areas for enhancement. The goal is to strengthen digital applications to prepare for future global crises.

Bibliographic research was done, and the databases used included PubMed, IEEE Xplore, Google Scholar, and Scopus. During the research, the following search terms were used: COVID-19 mobile applications, m-Government COVID-19, Healthcare apps COVID-19, Fintech COVID-19, Public service delivery COVID-19. The selected studies were also reviewed thematically, that is, repeatedly with a focus on the themes, success, and barriers of the three sectors.

While the study follows a systematic process for selecting and categorising literature, the analysis is also exploratory in nature. Through thematic synthesis, it identifies cross-cutting patterns, emerging challenges, and sector-specific insights that go beyond predefined categories. This approach allows for a more nuanced understanding of how mobile applications functioned during the COVID-19 crisis across healthcare, fintech, and public services.

The outbreak of COVID-19 put into sharply focus the role that digital innovation plays in crisis management. Mobile applications play an important role in improving health access, public service delivery, and user engagement. Recent studies highlight aspects of the contributions and limitations of these solutions by underlining challenges concerning security, user adoption, and infrastructure.

H. Salman et al. (2022) applied the Technology Acceptance Model to the adoption of m-government services and integrated factors like social influence and trust derived from the use of technology in Bahrain. Perceived utility and the aspect of trust were found to be critical drivers for such adoptions. This provided valuable insight into user experience, where trust and perceived usefulness play a major role. Another approach discussed by R. Peiris et al. (2022) to increase user confidence during COVID-19, safety in the taxi sector by including user education and safety tracking features. Their approach of using tracking and data analytics to monitor the COVID-19 status of drivers and passengers has something in common with the relevant tracking and reporting of symptoms and exposures used by healthcare apps.

The usability of Saudi mobile health applications (SMHA) during the pandemic using SMART heuristics targeted at mobile devices was evaluated by M. Booday et al. (2021). This was a heuristic assessment, unmasked various usability issues that restricted user experience, emphasising the need for user-friendly design and functionality.

Furthermore, the study by N. Darapaneni et al. (2021) looked at the COVID-19 confinement strategies and stages of lockdowns in Karnataka, India, through the first two waves of the pandemic. By using an EDA with hypothesis testing and statistical measures like p-values and t-statistics, strict lockdowns, lower infection rate, and breaking the chains of transmission. The pandemic of COVID-19 forced rapid adaptations in the delivery of public services, underlining the flexibility of digital applications in responding to unforeseen challenges. In the cultural and tourism sectors, R. Thirupathieswaran et al. (2022) presented a system of Mobile Application-based Secured Smart Museum, which addressed sharp declines in museum visits and revenue while ensuring safety and building trust.

Inayatulloh et al. (2021) proposed an e-government model in the public service sector to resolve access and quality of service issues affected by the pandemic. This research, through qualitative analysis of stakeholder and citizen involvement, developed a framework for better engagement with citizens and ensuring the accessibility of basic services during lockdowns. The increased digital activity while working from home during the pandemic, as explored by J. Ahmed et al.(2020) is the reason for cybersecurity concern. From this research, the sudden increase in internet usage made people and organisations more likely to become targets; cybercriminals have leveraged loopholes in data protection.

Lastly, the work of I. Syafarina et al. (2021) took Indonesia’s Large-scale Social Restrictions as a containment measure. A linear regression analysis showed that human mobility reduction was effective in the spread of COVID-19 for an initial period, though it waned during the peak times of traveling. This study critically represents a contribution of mobility data to pandemic response planning, suggesting that data-driven insights from digital applications may support the optimisation of lockdown strategies.

The above studies show how mobile applications have played a vital role during the COVID-19 pandemic in many sectors, including healthcare, fintech, and public services. Based on this review, through all phases of the lockdown, these applications facilitated necessary services such as telemedicine, contact tracing, digital payments, and e-government. Focusing on these sectors, the following review focuses on key contributions and challenges experienced, therefore based on further understanding of the domains in which the roles of mobile applications were involved in pandemic response.

Mobile applications played a central role in addressing healthcare challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic. Mobile health technologies enabled several critical functions, including symptom tracking, contact tracing, telemedicine, and vaccination coordination. For instance, India’s Aarogya Setu, Indonesia’s PeduliLindungi, and Malaysia’s MySejahtera were developed and implemented to track infection rates, identify potential contacts, and provide timely updates on the status of the pandemic (Yasir et al., 2020; Mansoor et al., 2021). These applications empowered governments and public health departments to enhance their response strategies and improve public communication.

Research conducted by Yasir et al. (2020) examined the influence of e-government and COVID-19 word-of-mouth (WOM) on online social presence during the pandemic. Their findings underline that e-government affects social media interactions, promotes compliance with protective measures, and affects public opinion. While e-government trust is crucial for pandemic management, positive COVID-19 WOM boosts the public's desire to adopt safety actions.

Similarly, Mansoor et al. (2021) examined how governance practices, responsiveness, accountability, and transparency affect public trust in government during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study focused on concepts like trust in government and perceived government response to COVID-19 (PGRC). Composite reliability, average variance extracted, the heterotrait-monotrait ratio, and the coefficient of determination are the metrics assessed in the analysis using SmartPLS 3.3.0.

Furthermore, the work by Alharbi et al. (2022) investigated public knowledge, use, and acceptance of mobile health apps Sehha, Mawid, and Tetamman during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study gathers demographic information on data on age, gender, education level, and occupation while evaluating usability, perceived usefulness, cognitive load, security and privacy concerns, and reliability. The findings reveal that 85.7% of participants were aware of at least one app.

In order to identify the need for future initiatives, Sujarwoto et al. (2022) examine COVID-19-related mobile health applications in Indonesia. It evaluates usability, usefulness, integration, infrastructure, and data security through user feedback based on WHO guidelines and the mHealth technology fit framework. Findings show that while the apps focus on information dissemination, self-risk assessments, online forums, and telemedicine, they lack contact tracing and health management features.

The goal of the study by Alkhwaldi et al. (2022) was to develop a framework to analyse the factors affecting the adoption of mobile government services in Jordan during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study focuses on factors, including performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, facilitating conditions, trust, corruption avoidance, and fear of COVID-19. It emphasises that incorporating trust, corruption avoidance, and fear of COVID-19 into the UTAUT model deepened the understanding of m-government adoption in Jordan.

Factors affecting the adoption of Indonesia's Peduli Lindungi app, an essential m-government tool during COVID-19, were examined in the study by Kurniasih et al. (2024), it analysed perceived usefulness, ease of use, service quality, system quality, and information quality. A survey of three months consisting of 26 items with a Likert scale. Results indicated that perceived usefulness, ease of use, and service quality significantly drive app adoption, while system and information quality play a lesser role.

According to Caetano et al. (2020), during COVID-19, investigating government initiatives accelerated the implementation of telemedicine in Brazil's healthcare system. The study emphasised telehealth as a vital instrument in Brazil's pandemic response, facilitating remote care monitoring and treatment, and it did so by drawing on government initiatives and literature assessments. Bassi et al. (2020) investigated how mobile applications can enhance the governance and delivery of public health services in India during COVID-19. Awareness, accessibility, healthcare needs, and training support were the main topics of the study. Participants included the general population or technical specialists, and healthcare professionals using both qualitative and quantitative techniques as surveys and interviews.

Furthermore, Alsyouf et al. (2020) explored the deployment of mobile health apps in Saudi Arabia to enhance public health surveillance during COVID-19. The study focused on technology integration, user engagement, and data privacy and security. Instead of utilising specific questionnaires or surveys it conducted qualitative reviews of various Saudi mHealth applications. The success of these initiatives underscores the potential of smartphone technology to revolutionise healthcare in the country.

In Indonesia, Lu et al. (2023) examined the connection between health stress and the desire to use mobile health apps during the pandemic. The research explored perceived utility, satisfaction, convenience, and health stress. The results showed that intention to keep using these apps is influenced by perceived satisfaction and usefulness. The author Prathap et al. (2020) introduced the use of combining the Health Belief Model and the Expectation Confirmation Model to explain the adoption and continued use of mobile payment services during COVID-19. The study explored factors of perceived severity, susceptibility, self-efficacy, perceived usefulness, and satisfaction. Data from 654 participants in India. Findings showed perceived health threats, especially severity and susceptibility, significantly influence mobile payment adoption.

According to Nie et al. (2023), perceived service quality and information quality were the main elements that determined the continued desire to use mobile health services. A questionnaire was used to gather data from 334 mHealth users. To increase user engagement and guarantee the continued use of mHealth apps, the results emphasised the significance of improving e-health literacy and service quality.

Nathan et al. (2022) explored factors affecting public acceptance of location-based mobile government services for emergency management. Perceived utility, trust, and privacy concerns were identified as the main determinants of attitudes and intentions to use these services during emergencies through a survey and Partial Least Squares analysis. To improve government services during emergencies, H.S. Oztaskin et al. (2024) presented the use of a Mobile-based Emergency Response System that uses mobile technology. Emphasising reliability, trust, security, and privacy, the study details the development and testing of system components, including an ontology-supported case-based reasoning system and a text information extraction and aggregation algorithm.

An ontology-supported case-based reasoning framework for m-Government emergency response services was presented by Haili Li et al. (2024), offering decision support to government agencies and mobile users in times of emergency. A survey with 24 questions across 20 subjects assessed ease of use, usefulness, disaster information presentation, and satisfaction. Results reveal user satisfaction regarding ease of use, usefulness, and clarity of disaster information.

Across the health sector, common themes emerge, particularly the consistent influence of trust, usability, and perceived usefulness on mobile health app adoption (Alharbi et al., 2022; Yasir et al., 2020; Lu et al., 2023). Several studies emphasise the importance of government responsiveness and transparent communication in building public trust (Mansoor et al., 2021; Nathan et al., 2022). However, the degree of technological sophistication and integration varies: some apps like Hello, Dr. Farah Wahida et al. (2021) and RO-SmartAgeing Paraschiv et al. (2022) incorporated AI and IoT for advanced monitoring, while others focused solely on contact tracing and symptom reporting Sujarwoto et al. (2022). Despite rapid deployment, interoperability with national health systems and long-term sustainability remain critical, showing gaps, especially in lower-income settings (Cunningham et al., 2019). In addition, the ethics of data sharing during emergencies are underexplored, with some platforms collecting and sharing user data without clear consent mechanisms (Wahida et al., 2021; Nie et al., 2023). These findings highlight the need for sustainable, privacy-conscious, and cross-compatible digital health systems for future public health resilience.

The pandemic increased the use of mobile fintech applications as a mode of making contactless payments and financial inclusion mechanisms. This study reveals that stocks in the fintech industry experienced a sharp rise in the usage of mobile applications during the pandemic. Due to lockdown measures that limited physical contact Al Nawayseh et al. (2020) there was a shift towards digital wallets to avoid any contact through cash. Mobile wallets such as MadaPay in Saudi Arabia, WeChat Pay in China, Paytm in India, and GoPay in Southeast Asia have become essential for financial transactions.

The pandemic public service, with a focus on social distancing, has transformed the services that were delivered. Mobile applications maintained the continued availability of critical public services as governments’ physical offices were closed and face-to-face encounters minimised Karetsos et al. (2014). Furthermore, Table 3 outlines major public sector mobile applications used during COVID-19, focusing on governance, emergency response, and citizen engagement.

The study explored how mobile apps, based on Argenti’s (2013) crisis communication principles, impacted COVID-19 management. While effective in addressing urgent needs, their rapid development introduced challenges that affected their efficiency and user acceptance.

The rapid development of connected mobile apps created challenges and also opened up new opportunities for innovation, policy development, and cross-industry collaboration.

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