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The exponential growth of smartphones is complemented by an astronomical development of mobile apps that have been changing ways in which humans interact with each other, as well as how brands and customers interact. This study aims to examine the effect of mobile device and mobile app innovations on user lifestylisation among consumers from developing countries.

Through a qualitative approach, data was collected via focus group interviews from 32 participants from across 15 developing countries who were largely emerging cosmopolitans.

Using the thematic analysis technique, the study finds that consumer lifestylisations, based on consumption and utilisation of mobile devices and mobile apps, hinge on either pre-purchase considerations or post-purchase discoveries that stem from a bouquet of hedonic and/or utilitarian motivations. Two consumer categories are identified, with each category exhibiting unique patterns.

The empirical findings provide valuable theoretical contributions to new knowledge as well as practical implications for mobile gadget manufacturers and mobile app developers domiciled, or those aiming to establish their presence, in developing economies.

This chapter provides a historical contextualisation of health tracking and public health communication from the post-World War Two development of the welfare state, through the birth of neoliberalism, until today’s individualising practices of digital health tracking and quantification of bodies. Through an examination of these three phases of public health quantification of bodies, encompassing the socio-economic, cultural and political shifts since 1948, combined with the development and wide adoption of digital health and self-quantifying technologies, this chapter traces the changing landscape and the dramatic implications this has had for shifting who is responsible for maintaining ‘good’ health. This chapter illustrates how neoliberal free market principles have reigned over UK public health discourse for many decades, seeing health as no longer binary to illness, but as a practice of individual self-quantification and self-care. In turn, the chapter explores how the quantification and health tracking of bodies has become a dominant discourse in public health promotion, as well as individual citizenship and patient practices. This discourse still exists pervasively as we move into the digital society of the 2020s, through the Covid-19 pandemic and beyond; with public health strategies internationally promoting the use of digital health tools in our everyday, further positioning citizens as entrepreneurial subjects, adopting extensive technological measures in an attempt to measure and ‘optimise’ health, normalising the everyday quantification of bodies.