Gluten-free apps, disability, and travel: Developing a critical heuristic for the implementation of mobile apps

Abstract

Mobile applications are often positioned as a technologically driven answer to navigating the world with disability; nevertheless, apps created for specialized communities designed to facilitate mobility can quickly meet friction that stymies movement through place. Accordingly, the effectiveness of mobile apps is determined by a complex sociotechnical puzzle that includes cultures, industry regulations, public knowledge and legislation, the unique histories of urban spaces, and infrastructural access. Drawing from short-term autoethnographic approaches designed to evaluate the utility of mobile applications, this article provides a critical assessment of using location-aware gluten-free apps to navigate traveling in an unfamiliar location, context, and culture with celiac disease. These experiences serve as the basis of a critical heuristic for assessing how the success or lack thereof of app functionality is predicated on the complex networked contexts in which they are embedded: cultural histories of place, the spatial layering of information, and infrastructures of monetization.