Why Samply exists
Research methods such as experience sampling, daily diary studies, and ecological momentary assessment all share one requirement: participants must be prompted to respond at the right moment, repeatedly, on their own phones. Before Samply, setting that up meant confronting three recurring problems.
Samply was built to remove all three barriers: one cross-platform app, no restrictions on survey format (you bring your own survey tool), and free to use.
Development timeline
Development started in 2018 as a module within Open Lab, an online experiment platform. It grew into an independent project with its own mobile app, web dashboard, REST API, and an active research community.
- Samply began as a notification module inside Open Lab (open-lab.online), a platform for running online experiments, designed for researchers who needed to prompt participants by push notification.
- Aim: let any researcher schedule mobile notifications without writing native app code.
- First public version of the Samply Research mobile app released.
- Samply becomes supported by the iScience group at the University of Konstanz, where lead developer Yury Shevchenko is employed as a post-doctoral researcher.
- Website usability study conducted.
- First ESM studies on time-management and well-being run on the platform.
- Samply described in a peer-reviewed article in Behavior Research Methods (Shevchenko, Kuhlmann & Reips, 2021, BRM 53, 1710–1730).
- Geofencing feature added: notifications triggered automatically when a participant enters or leaves a defined location.
- Mobile app usability study.
- Public and private study types introduced.
- Time zone support in notification scheduling.
- Expiration time for notification links.
- Samply API released — researchers can now send notifications based on external custom events from their own systems.
- Mobile app translated into German, Dutch, Russian, and Chinese.
- Event-contingent sampling added.
- Reminders and completion registration.
- ESM studies on hybrid work, well-being, and a Corona daily survey conducted.
- Geofencing validation study completed and published (Shevchenko & Reips, 2024, BRM 56, 6411–6439).
- Empirical evidence on optimal radius, iOS vs Android sensitivity, and recommended dwell times.
- Researchers can now edit notifications that are already scheduled — a long-requested capability.
- Evaluation of misinformation in news study conducted.
- Full redesign of the researcher web dashboard — rebuilt for clarity, with a cleaner information architecture, improved schedule management, and a new documentation system.
- Samply Research mobile app redesigned with a focus on usability and a more welcoming participant experience.
- Goal: make Samply straightforward for researchers who are new to experience-sampling methods, while keeping the full power available to advanced users.
Open source and free
Since 2020, Samply has been supported by the iScience group at the University of Konstanz. The lead developer, Yury Shevchenko, is employed there as a post-doctoral researcher. The group's research focus on internet-based methods and experience-sampling directly shapes Samply's design and feature priorities.
Samply is free to use and open source. The source code for the web dashboard is available on GitHub. Contributions, bug reports, and feature requests are welcome.
If you use Samply in your research, please cite the original publication:
Shevchenko, Y., Kuhlmann, T., & Reips, U.-D. (2021). Samply: A user-friendly smartphone app and web-based means of scheduling and sending mobile notifications for experience-sampling research. Behavior Research Methods, 53, 1710–1730.
https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-020-01527-9