Modern Mobile Apps for Visitor Guidance: The Perspective of World’s Leading Art Museums

After the initial excitement of what the mobile technologies offer to museum visitors, for a number of reasons, many museums in the world canceled or at least reduced in functionality their mobile apps for visitor guidance. Conversely, the recent pandemic strengthened the interest in self-guided tours for which mobile apps provide a convenient solution. In this paper, we strive to uncover the current state of BYOD mobile visitor guides using the sample of 106 world’s most visited art museums. We combine data from app distribution platforms and manual examination of the e-guides to determine their availability, popularity, user-reported quality and its differentiation depending on distribution model and platform, as well as technological features. The obtained results: confirm the wide availability of such apps in museums, and their sustained, though limited in size, popularity among visitors; show the lack of notable differences in user-reported quality of apps distributed in different models and for different platforms; and reveal a low level of proliferation of advanced functions, such as automatic visitor positioning, visitor engagement support (with gamification and social network integration), as well as extending visitor experiences beyond physical space with augmented or virtual reality, indicating space for improvement of the offered mobile guides using only the readily available technologies.