Hospital apps on the Play Store: what 50 Indian hospital apps and 827 reviews show

Data collected on 15 November 2026 by Gaurav Phogat. Method, scoring rules and dataset are published below.

I looked at 50 official Android apps of Indian hospitals on the Google Play Store and read the 827 newest reviews they had. The typical app is rated 3.6 stars, and more than half of the newest reviews (52%) gave one or two stars. The complaints are rarely about medicine. They are about apps that will not open, OTPs that never arrive and reports that will not load. Only 11 of the 48 apps with reviews had replied to any of their newest ones.

See every hospital growth strategy guide in one place.

Most hospital groups I meet want an app. It feels like the natural next step after the website: one place for appointments, reports and bills that sits on the patient’s home screen. But an app is also a public product with a public scorecard. Every frustrated patient can leave a one-star review, and it stays on the listing for years.

I wanted to see what that scorecard looks like for Indian hospitals today, so I went through the Play Store listings myself. This is the latest study in my series on how Indian hospitals show up online, and like the others, every number here comes from data I collected on a single day.

Key findings

1. The typical hospital app is rated 3.6 stars. The median listed rating across 48 rated apps was 3.57. Only 4 apps were at 4.5 or above, and 10 were below 3.0.
2. More than half of recent reviews are negative. Of the 827 newest reviews, 429 (52%) gave one or two stars, and 384 (46%) gave a single star.
3. The listed rating flatters the recent experience. At 31 of 35 apps with five or more reviews in the past year, those recent reviews averaged below the listed rating. At 22 of them, the gap was more than half a star.
4. Patients complain about the app, not the doctor. Of 429 negative reviews, 132 (31%) described an app that crashed, hung or would not load, and 103 (24%) mentioned login, OTP or registration trouble. Only 25 (6%) were about staff or hospital service.
5. Replies are rare. Developers had replied to 128 of 827 reviews (15%). Only 11 of 48 apps replied to any of their newest reviews, and none of the 9 government apps did.
6. Apps that reply are rated higher. The 11 apps that replied had a median rating of 4.17, against 3.53 for the 37 that did not.
7. Upkeep is uneven. 26 of 50 apps had been updated in the last 90 days, but 7 had gone more than a year without an update.

How I did this

Sample. I searched the Google Play Store (India, English) for “hospital <city>” across 15 cities: Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Pune, Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Lucknow, Kochi, Chandigarh, Indore, Coimbatore and Nagpur. I ran 13 more searches to widen the net, covering Bhubaneswar, Surat, Kozhikode, Visakhapatnam, Mangaluru, Gurugram, Patna, Ludhiana, Thiruvananthapuram and Madurai, plus generic terms such as “multispeciality hospital india”. From the results I kept apps in the Medical category that are the official patient app of a single Indian hospital or hospital group, published by the hospital or by a vendor on its behalf, with one app per hospital.

I excluded games, aggregators, pharmacy and lab apps, apps for doctors or staff, state-wide health record systems, hospitals outside India, apps that did not look official, and a small number of hospital groups I keep out of all my studies. That left 50 apps: 5 from national chains, 6 from regional chains, 2 from private teaching hospitals, 28 from standalone private hospitals and 9 from government hospitals. I assigned the hospital type from public information.

What I collected. On 15 November 2026 I recorded, for each app, the listed rating, the rating count, the installs band and the last update date shown on the listing. I then opened the full review list, sorted it by Newest and recorded up to 20 of the newest reviews: star rating, date, text and whether the developer had replied. 37 apps gave me the full 20; smaller apps had fewer, and 2 apps had no reviews at all. That makes 827 reviews in total.

Scoring. I coded every review into themes with keyword rules on the review text. “App broken” covers words like crash, not opening, error, stuck, not loading and useless. “Login” covers OTP, login, password, registration and verification. “Booking” covers appointment, book, slot, token and consult. “Reports” covers report, result, record, prescription and lab. “Payment” covers payment, refund, paid, money and transaction. “Staff or service” covers staff, reception, rude, waiting, treatment and billing. “Praise” covers words like easy, good, helpful, useful and thank. A review can sit in several themes or in none. Negative means one or two stars; positive means four or five.

Limits. This covers Android only, not iOS. The listed rating is Google’s own figure, which weights recent reviews. Twenty newest reviews is a snapshot: for a large app it spans a few days, for a small one it can span years. Keyword coding is blunt; it misses sarcasm and reviews in Indian languages, and it counts a word like “book” wherever it appears, so treat theme numbers as directional. None of this is a judgement of any hospital’s clinical care.

Most hospital apps sit between 3 and 4 stars

48 of the 50 apps had enough ratings to show a score. Half of them landed between 3.0 and 3.9. That is the number a patient sees before deciding whether to install.

Hospital type mattered. National chain apps had a median rating of 4.35, well clear of everyone else. Regional chains came in at 3.70 and standalone hospitals at 3.62. Government apps had a median of 3.18, and the two private teaching hospital apps were rated 2.60 and 3.52.

Reach is modest too. Only 2 apps had crossed one million installs and 14 more had passed 100,000, while 11 had fewer than 10,000. The median app had about 150 ratings, so a handful of angry reviews can move the score.

For the next step, see Doctor Profile Pages Study, Adani’s Kolkata hospital is a brand play before it is a building and What Hospital YouTube Channels Actually Get Watched: A 64-Channel Study.

Government apps stand out. Their typical install band was 100,000 or more, because patients often need them for an OPD token or a report, yet two in three of their newest reviews were one or two stars.

The listed rating flatters the recent experience

The star rating on a listing is built over years. It includes the burst of five-star reviews many apps collect at launch, often from staff and early users. So I compared it with what reviewers said in the last twelve months, for the 35 apps that had at least five reviews in that window.

At 31 of those 35 apps, recent reviews averaged below the listed rating. At 22, the gap was more than half a star, and the median gap was 0.76 stars. Only 4 apps were doing better recently than their overall score. If you run a hospital app, the number on your listing is probably kinder than what your patients are telling you this year.

What patients actually complain about

I expected waiting times and billing to dominate the negative reviews. They did not. The negative reviews were overwhelmingly about the app failing at a basic job.

The app opens to a blank screen. The OTP does not arrive, or arrives after it has expired. Registration asks for a hospital ID the patient does not have. A report shows as ready but will not download. Those are product and engineering problems, and they are fixable.

Positive reviews read differently. 267 of the 360 positive reviews (74%) used words like easy, helpful or useful. And 50 positive reviews (14%) talked about staff, treatment or the hospital itself. In other words, happy patients often review the hospital, while unhappy patients review the app.

Hardly anyone answers

Google lets developers reply publicly to every review. Most hospital apps do not use it. Only 128 of the 827 newest reviews (15%) had a reply, and only 11 of the 48 apps with reviews had replied to any of them.

Replying apps were rated higher: a median of 4.17 for the 11 that replied, against 3.53 for the 37 that did not. I would not read that as replies lifting ratings on their own. More likely, the teams that read reviews and reply are the same teams that fix the bugs those reviews point to. Either way, silence under a one-star review tells the next patient that nobody is listening.

Updates and upkeep

An app is never finished: Android, OTP providers and hospital systems all change underneath it.

Apps updated in the last 90 days had a median rating of 3.74, against 3.39 for the rest. Two apps had no ratings and no reviews at all, and one app’s newest review was close to five years old. An app that nobody maintains still carries the hospital’s name and logo on every phone that has it.

What this means for hospital marketers

• Treat the app listing as a reputation channel. It deserves the same weekly attention as your Google Business Profile. Give one person ownership of reviews and the rating.
• Reply to every one or two star review. Offer a fix or a route, such as a helpline or support email, not a copied apology. Never mention diagnoses, treatment or anything that confirms the reviewer was a patient, and never promise outcomes.
• Fix login first. A quarter of complaints are about getting in. Test OTP delivery across networks, allow registration without a hospital ID where possible, and keep sessions alive so patients do not log in every time.
• Make reports work on a basic phone. Report download is the main reason many patients install. Test it on low-cost Android phones and slow connections.
• Watch the recent average, not the listed rating. Track the average stars of new reviews each month. It warns you long before the listing number moves.
• Ask for reviews at the right moment, and fairly. Use Google’s in-app review prompt after a successful booking or report download. Do not offer incentives, do not ask only happy patients, and do not turn reviews into testimonials in your advertising, which the NMC 2026 guidelines and Play policy both restrict.
• Be honest about whether you need an app. If you cannot fund updates and review replies, a fast mobile website with booking and report access may serve patients better than a neglected app.

Many of the same friction points show up on hospital websites. My study of online OPD booking flows counts the clicks and OTP steps on 50 hospital sites, and my test of hospital website chatbots shows how often patients get a straight answer. For the review side of reputation, see my study of hospital Google Business Profiles, and for the wider picture, my guide to digital solutions in healthcare.

Download the data

The full dataset (CSV) has one row per app in shuffled order: an anonymised reference, hospital type, Play Store rating, rating count, installs band, days since the last update, the number of newest reviews collected, counts of one and two star and four and five star reviews, reviews with a developer reply, the age of the newest review, reviews in the last 12 months and their average stars, keyword theme counts across all collected reviews, and the collection date. It contains no app names, hospital names, reviewer names or review text. Collection date: 15 November 2026. The data is licensed under CC BY 4.0: you can reuse it with credit and a link to this page.

How to cite this study

Phogat, G. (2026). Hospital apps on the Play Store: ratings and reviews of 50 Indian hospital apps. gauravphogat.com. https://gauravphogat.com/hospital-app-ratings-study/ Data collected 15 November 2026. Licensed under CC BY 4.0.

Questions people ask