Apple's iPhone, launched in 2007, fused a multi-touch screen, GPS receiver, camera and always-on mobile data into a single pocket device, and Google's Android (first handset 2008) made the form factor cheap and ubiquitous. Within a decade most urban dwellers carried continuous self-positioning and connectivity, generating location traces as a by-product of ordinary movement. The handset became a universal interface to maps, payments, messaging and an entire ecosystem of location-aware applications. It also turned each person into a mobile sensor feeding data back to platform operators.
It put real-time wayfinding, on-demand services and granular location data in nearly every pocket, becoming the substrate for app-mediated urban life. Cities increasingly came to be navigated, transacted and surveilled through the screen rather than through fixed signage or physical points of access.
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