Physiology is part of the core curriculum of all our biomedical programmes. First-year biomedical and health-care students are often intimidated by the overwhelming amount of material they are required to master within a short time-frame. Since 2009, we have delivered a number of computer-based animated courseware packages to first-year students to aid their understanding of physiology. Although these packages depict complicated physiological mechanisms in clear sequences, students can only access them through the university e-learning platform. Both flexibility and convenience of use are compromised. We thus began to explore mobile-learning applications (apps) for our courseware, developing PhysioApp in 2012. This app (with both iOS and android versions) is specially tailored for first-year students who have no basic knowledge of physiology. It covers human respiratory and cardiovascular responses to different levels of exercise and other important areas such as thermoregulation and hormonal responses. The students’ main learning objective was to use the app in tandem with the knowledge obtained during their physiology course to enhance their understanding of how the respiratory and cardiovascular systems respond to exercise. We measured the access rates of students from different courses after the end of term. The average access rates ranged from 33.33 to 88.89%. Students who had not used the app (those studying human biology) were asked in class to explain their decision via a student-response system. They all commented that PhysioApp did not include a quiz allowing them to test their knowledge, unlike other, computer-based courseware packages. The whole class of students was also asked to vote in favour of using either app-based or computer-based courseware to learn physiology. Eighty per cent of the students replied that they had no preference as long as the courseware included an auto-marking exercise or quiz. In conclusion, we demonstrated the emergence and growth of new information technologies in physiology education. We also showed that the development of apps helps to expand the range of creative teaching and learning practices. According to our most recent data, however, the students in the human biology programme had no distinct preference for either computer-based or Web-based/app-based tools for physiology e-learning. Student learning is clearly still driven by assessment, which is reflected in the students’ request that we add quizzes to our e-learning packages.