Smartphone ownership has increased over the past decade, reaching around half or more of the global population, while in high-income countries, smartphone ownership is as high as 80 % [[1], [2], [3], [4]]. This make smartphone to an extremely available tool for both clinicians and patients. Over the past few years an increasing number of smartphone applications (apps) have been developed for the healthcare category and, more specifically, related to the field of Otolaryngology- Head and Neck Surgery (ORL-HNS) [5]. These apps are designed to facilitate screening, diagnosis, treatment and/or follow-up provided to patients and/or physicians. This issue gained a significant importance during the SARS-CoV-2, were not only remote areas suffered limited access to medical facilities, but also social isolation prevented direct in person patient-physician interaction [6].

As a result, ORL-HNS apps gained popularity among patients and clinicians, in all sub-disciplines of ORL-HNS. However, lack of regulations in the various app-stores results of no official scientific evaluation before being commercialized, not only questioning their clinical significance but also highlights safety issues [7]. Several publications describing ORL-HNS apps exist, with focus of a specific sub-specialty [[8], [9], [10]] or lack of systematic search [10,11]. Additionally, no reviews of apps (validated or non-validated) for the physician usage are found in ORL-HNS.

The aim of this paper is to provide a systematic review of the literature and details of validated-only mobile apps in all sub-disciplines of ORL-HNS for patient and/or physician use in order to facilitate evidenced based validated apps in this field. As far as the authors know, this is the first paper to include apps for physicians' use (in addition to those of patients' use).