Mobile apps and services for development: What can we learn from the non-smartphone era in ICT4D?

This project aims to describe and explain the field of mobile apps and services for development—'m4d' apps and services—primarily by studying its realisation in South Africa during the pre-smartphone era. Concepts from infrastructure studies (Star, 199) and platform studies (Montfort & Bogost, 2009) are employed to describe the relationship between technology platforms and the apps and services built on them. Research activities include producing a historical and technical account of the mobile network and platforms for m4d apps and services, taking inventory of m4d apps and services in South Africa and categorizing them according to various dimensions of interest, conducting and analysing unstructured interviews with developers and designers of m4d apps and services, and carrying out an exploratory quantitative analysis of secondary data generated through use of a mobile data collection app. The findings demonstrate that claims about the potential for m4d apps and services should be understood in the context of embodied infrastructural limitations, arising from the gap between design context and the use contexts in the developing world. The result is a field with limited diversity, with designs for m4d apps and services reducible to a relatively small number of archetypes. Alignment with actants in the global network for m4d apps and services, including funders, mobile network operators and ""circuits of truth"" (Roy 2010, location 123) such as the GSMA's Mobiles for Development Impact programme produces additional incentives for concentration. Finally, the discursive construction of the m4d consensus as it relates to apps and services is not neutral. Whatever benefits accrue to users in the developing world, frames that position technologies as offering solutions to development problems are designed to achieve favourable public perception, and by extension favourable regulatory treatment, for technology industry interests.