[wlindley]

It's a program. "App" is a word, short for "Application Program," publicized by Apple for its handheld computers that masquerade as (and are euphemistically called) "telephones." "App" effectively means "proprietary closed-source program that talks to proprietary walled-garden programs running on someone else's computer, and acts as a spy sending all your sensitive data to who-knows-where."

No-one ever called a real program an "app" before that, did they?

[Smeevy]

I've been programming professionally for over 30 years and "app", "application", and "program" have been interchangeable for me and the people I worked with as far back as I can remember.

[peterfirefly]

Operating systems are not apps. Embedded controller programs are not apps.

[happytoexplain]

"Application" has been a common general term for an end-user program for a very long time, and "app" is just an obvious abbreviation that people and UIs have used to varying degrees all along. iOS apps merely mainstreamed the term, they didn't take ownership of it.

[TeMPOraL]

iOS mainstreamed it, but for a long time, "app" had a different meaning. Like, "application" was the big full-featured thing you run on your PC; "app" was the toy thing you run on the phone.

Then some "genius" started calling their desktop offerings "apps" (perhaps because lazy multiplatform-via- webap development eventually extended to marketing copy"), and now everything is an "app".

[0xcde4c3db]

I don't recall seeing "app" on its own that often, but there was the idiom "killer app", meaning an application that was compelling enough to drive sales of its host platform (VisiCalc on Apple II being the go-to example).

[tom_]

GEM on the Atari ST supported the .app (short for "application") extension for gui executables. One of its components was the AES, short for Application Environment Services. This stuff dates from the early to mid 1980s.

[cannam]

> No-one ever called a real program an "app" before that, did they?

Yes. Apple called them apps in the 80s, at least on the Mac - this is Apple II but it's plausible they were also referred to as apps there?

For my part I read the title as "Taking over a wall changed my direction as a programmer" which had me really confused for a while. I'd like to read that article, I think.

[musicale]

Apple (App-le?) certainly popularized abbreviating "applications programs" or "application software" (vs. system software, systems programs etc.) to "applications" in the 1980s, and "apps" with the advent of the App Store in 2008, but Apple was unsuccessful in trying to obtain and enforce an App Store trademark given prior uses of app, store, and app store (including, perhaps ironically given Steve Jobs' return and Apple's acquisition of NeXT, a store for NeXTSTEP apps.) "Killer App(lication)" dates to the 1980s, applying to software like VisiCalc for the Apple II.

[majormajor]

"Applications" was a very common term in the classic Mac days. "Programs" was a more Windows-y term. ("Applications" vs "Program Files" in ye olden 90s world of where to put things you installed.)

[koolba]

IIRC, even the default template on Windows in the early 90s with Visual Studio was MFCApp.

[TeMPOraL]

In my experience, end-user programs you'd run and operate were called "applications" or "programs", and it was a specialist term anyway, because general population didn't think in terms of applications anyway - they thought in terms of "running Word" or "running Google", with the machine itself an implementation detail.

As I remember it, the term "app" came from smartphones, where it referred specifically to smartphone applications. Connotations were rather negative - inferior facsimile of the real thing (not even a full application - just an "app"), also came from "app marketplace"[0][1]. And to this days, apps are inferior to their desktop counterparts (at least surviving ones), except marketing won this one - people got used to this term, then some vendors started calling desktop software "apps", and now suddenly everything is an app.

--

[0] - To this day I roll my eyes at the mental model here. It feels unnatural and wrong, but that's maybe because I'm not used to think in terms of trying to find markets and money-making opportunities everywhere.

[1] - Or maybe it was just a huge letdown to me, and I'm soured ever since. Back when first iPhones and then Android came out, I was hoping a full-blown computer with a Linux on board would mean it'll be much easier to just write your own stuff for it. That it would feel more like a desktop in terms of functionality, capabilities, opportunities. I did not expect them to come up with "app stores" and lock the thing down, and made you accept the mark of the beast, entangle yourself with the commercial universe, just to be able to add your own joke app or such.

Since then, it only got worse.