Infrastructures by the users for users: Motivations, constraints, and consequences of user-driven infrastructuring of mobile phones

Users adapt infrastructures materially to fit their needs, they engage in maintenance and repair, learn about the inner workings of infrastructures. Different degrees user engagement with are empirically analysed using case user-developed alternative mobile operating systems. Some observations agency made already early studies appropriation media technology were found be still relevant: moral considerations motivate users infrastructuring actively negotiate infrastructural attachments. But ‘acting on’ is also different from devices: users’ experiments require redundancy inherently collective. Moreover, certain designs can enable demand user-driven infrastructures, while others block it.