Software systems have far-reaching effects on sustainability—affecting the environment, society, individuals, the economy, and technical longevity. The Sustainability Awareness Framework (SusAF) supports anticipating these effects across five dimensions and three orders of effects, but currently relies on expert-driven workshops conducted during early system development. Meanwhile, Crowd-based Requirements Engineering (CrowdRE) has demonstrated that user feedback—both explicit (e.g., app store reviews) and implicit (e.g., usage patterns, telemetry)—is a valuable source for eliciting requirements. Yet, user feedback has not been systematically analyzed for sustainability-relevant information.

In this research preview, we bridge these two research streams. We present a coding guidebook that operationalizes SusAF’s dimensions for user feedback analysis and report preliminary results from a deductive content analysis combining manual coding with LLM-based classification of 500 app store reviews from 5 mobile applications across 5 domains. Our findings indicate that user feedback contains sustainability-relevant information spanning all five SusAF dimensions, with notable variation across application domains. We outline a research agenda toward a practitioner-oriented approach with tool support that integrates into existing RE and software engineering practices, supporting the sustainable evolution of software systems throughout their lifecycle.