Geographies of locative apps

A large part of what makes a smartphone “smart” is its built-in location-based services: its ability to locate and to be located. As researchers such as Jordan Frith (2015) have noted, the smartphone is itself a form of locative media, enabling the co-construction of “hybrid” physical–digital spaces and places through its geolocative infrastructures and mobile affordances. Researchers have also considered the smartphone to be an ever-more ubiquitous example of geomedia (McQuire 2016) or spatial media (Leszczynski 2015; Kitchin, Lauriault, and Wilson 2017). With smartphone ownership reaching saturation-point in the global North and growing rapidly, albeit unevenly, in advanced and emerging economies globally (Silver 2019), location-based apps and services, as well as the user-generated location data they elicit and collect, have become both big business and increasingly central to social governance. In this chapter, we examine the geographies of locative apps--by this, we mean their spatial infrastructures, affordances, and emerging cultural economies rather than the mapping of global geographies of mobile app usage. Our examination covers three themes: First, we trace the historical development leading to the rise of mobile media and ‘hybrid’ spatiality. Second, we discuss the spatial affordances and infrastructures of location-based apps and services and how these have contributed to an expanding location economy. Our final theme addresses the shape and nature of the emergent location industry and, in particular, its implications for user privacy. We outline how locative apps and services have been central to the emergence of mobile geolocation as a tool of continuous surveillance, while offering in conclusion some prospective pathways to a more equitable (locative) data future.