Chapter 6: Fostering Intimacy in a Digital Environment: Couples, Mobile Apps and Romantic Relationships

This chapter provides a mapping of the so-called couple apps, i.e. apps that generically promise to promote connectivity in several areas among the members of a romantic relationship. We focus on Apple's App Store offering and analyse all the available relevant apps: their year of release, the different categories, the apps' developers, the apps' presentation through its icon and description and the profile creation process. If couples' communication and behaviours have an impact on romantic relationship satisfaction and users' well-being, we question how such apps are characterised. We reveal that these apps try to respond to couples' needs related to several romantic relationship topics through a variety of approaches and methods. Nevertheless, such apps are governed by private companies with a commercial objective and through their design and affordances promote behaviours of a one-size-fits-all approach. As such, they seem not to promote diversity or spontaneity. Among these apps, heteronormativity regarding gender, roles, sexual orientation and romantic relationship format is to be assumed as the norm. As an effect, traditional views of what a couple is and related behaviours are transmitted, impacting how apps are understood and appropriated by users and having consequences on practices.