Читать книгу Apps - Gerard Goggin - Страница 11

What’s an app, and what’s an app store? As we have already seen, apps are obvious, but tricky to pin down. They are software, but depend on lots of other software, operating systems, hardware, and infrastructures. Then there are all the social conditions and dynamics that go into making apps possible—let alone useful and compelling, for their users and for social life. In this foundational chapter, then, I aim to provide a working definition of apps, to explain how they work and where they fit and bridge wider digital media and society.

In the first part I will give an anatomy of an app, looking at its main parts, what its functions are, and how apps fit into software, hardware, and other key technology systems. To understand the significance of apps as a social and technical accomplishment, it is useful to know a bit about their history and development. So, in the second part I look at predecessor technologies. I focus on histories of mobile technologies, especially handheld devices such as calculators, palm pilots, and portable digital assistants (PDAs), and then on mobile phones, but also on the network and software associated with these systems. This provides a context for understanding the smartphone moment in 2007–2009, which saw the launch of the iPhone, of Google’s Android operating system, and of app stores and eventually an avalanche of apps and associated take-up and innovation across users, organizations, institutions, and developers.