When Good Intentions Meet Bad Experiences among Users of Prosocial Mobile Applications

Prosocial mobile applications are increasingly positioned as tools for responsible consumption by helping consumers align everyday choices with health and sustainability goals. Yet little is known about how negative post-adoption experiences may undermine these aspirations. Drawing on 15,022 low-rated Google Play reviews from 17 apps related to healthy eating and sustainable consumption, this study uses Latent Dirichlet Allocation to identify recurrent sources of dissatisfaction. Seven themes emerge: unfair monetization, technical instability, harmful updates, inaccurate tracking, poor usability, account-support failures, and AI recognition errors. The findings show how platform design and governance can weaken trust, disrupt sustained responsible consumption, and expose tensions between ethical positioning and commercial practice. Positioned within consumer behavior research on digital marketing, the study introduces “mission betrayal” as an exploratory concept describing users’ perception that a platform’s conduct contradicts the social good it claims to support. The study contributes to debates on responsible consumption and marketing in a world of limits.