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The word “app” is short for “application.” The Oxford English Dictionary gives it this primary meaning:

A piece of software designed to perform a specific function other than one relating to the operation of the computer itself; esp. (in later use) one designed specifically to run on a mobile phone or tablet computer. (OED, 2020)

The OED registers the earliest instances of the word “app” and its plural “apps”; these occurred in Computerworld magazine in the early 1980s. “Killer app” is a term recorded as appearing in the late 1980s. It was short for “killer application,” meaning something indispensable or without a rival (OED). As software and computing historian Martin Campbell-Kelly explains, “[t]he ‘killer app’ hypothesis argues that a novel application, by enabling an activity that was previously impossible or too expensive, causes a new technology to become widely adopted” (Campbell-Kelly, 2003, p. 212). The moniker “killer app” was applied for instance to VisiCalc. VisiCalc was an application launched in 1979 that brought the spreadsheet to personal computing, paving the way for the PC to be taken seriously as a business tool (pp. 212–214). For some time, “apps” designated a diverse range of software applications for desktop or enterprises computers, handhelds (such as the Palm), Internet and web apps, and then, increasingly, mobile phones. For instance, applications for the mobile Internet wireless access protocol (WAP) were sometimes referred to as “WAP apps.” At this stage, though, “mobile apps” could still refer mostly to applications and design solutions for mobile hardware and devices—not necessarily just to software.

This changes from roughly 2001 onwards. That year saw an increase in the frequency of references to mobile apps and handheld apps—or, in the US context, wireless apps—across a range of news and journalism outlets, especially in the trade and business press. This is not surprising, given the industry’s growing focus on mobile applications development and the efforts to develop more content and services for emerging 2G and 3G mobile services. At the premier mobile industry event 3GSM World Congress in 2003 there were announcements of new commercial ventures designed to expand mobile app development and distribution. At this juncture, vendors were still seeking to link up mobile devices with software applications and data running on enterprise networks and services—the Canadian company Blackberry, for instance, was reported as aiming to “mobilise apps” (Moore, 2004).

As we shall see, apps really became a household word from 2008 onwards. To understand how this app moment came about, we’ll shortly have a look at some of the kinds of technologies, social developments, and media cultures that created the conditions for apps to become a household word. In the meanwhile, let’s see how apps work as a technology.

As software, apps cannot work without hardware. The key hardware for apps is the smartphone. The smartphone combines three previously separate functions: cellular mobile telecommunications; mobile Internet; and mobile computing. If you dismantle a smartphone, you will find a CPU (central processing unit). This is a computer chip that is typically integrated into a CMOS (complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor) SoC (system-on-a-chip) application processor. You will also find a power source in the form of a rechargeable battery. There will be one or more antennae (transducers) for receiving and transmitting data via electromagnetic waves in order to handle a range of different signals from cellular networks, Bluetooth, WiFi (wireless fidelity), the GPS (global positioning system), or NFC (near field communication). These may not all be housed in the same chip, but rather crammed into the device housings. Added to which, the antennae may be all in use at once, to help run apps across one, two, or all GPS, Bluetooth, WiFi, cellular mobile, and other networks (Hu & Tanner, 2018).

A smartphone usually contains a display. Layered over the screen is a touch screen. Typically this is a capacitive touchscreen, which senses a conductor such as the human finger, a stylus, or a glove with a conductive thread. Smartphones have notable audio capabilities in the form of small speakers used for input or output, music, speech, video, and other forms of audio. They have cameras, often very sophisticated ones—and, for some time, two cameras: a main one, rear-facing and of high resolution, and another, front-facing and of lower resolution, which is especially optimized for “selfies” and other kinds of mobile photography and video-making practice. Smartphones also have varying capacity to work with accessories such as headphones and with the different input options that accessories require. In addition to these capabilities, developed over the past forty or so years, smartphones incorporate a range of sensors that include gyroscopes, accelerometers, magnetometers, and promixity meters.

Smartphones have grown considerably in sophistication and capabilities, operating as they do at the frontiers of material science and technology, engineering, and computing, as well as interface, user experience, and other user-oriented disciplines. The hardware ensemble offered by smartphones provides a generative “base” or “matrix” for what apps can and cannot do. Apps have sent smartphones into the stratosphere as a consumer technology, so the software very much maketh the device. Conversely, for all their real and imaginary potential, apps remain anchored in the materialities of devices, their social contexts, and what users make of them.

Hence it is vital to understand that the proportion of people with access to smartphones varies significantly across different parts of the world, as well as across diverse groups and demographics. A survey carried out in 2018 by the US-based Pew Research Center found that, while there was an estimated 5 billion people in the world with mobile phones, only a little more than half of them had smartphones. Specifically, its data showed that “a median of 76 percent across 18 advanced economies surveyed have smartphones, compared with a median of only 45 percent in emerging economies [9 surveyed]” (Taylor & Silver, 2019, p. 3). While comparable data are not available yet for 2021, it is highly likely that a large proportion of the world’s mobile phone users will be using instead what is called “feature phones.” Feature phone users may not be able to access apps, the operating systems that support them, or the features that smartphones offer—or at least not at the same level as the users of more fully featured smartphones. There are various reasons why people continue to use feature phones: cost saving, long battery life, ease of use, compactness, digital detoxing, simpler interfaces, lack of need or desire for additional features or apps (Nagpal & Lyytinen, 2013; Petrovčič et al., 2016). Feature phones support music players, radio, SMS, limited Internet connectivity and web browsing, and email. In recent years, there has been a burgeoning market in what Jeffrey James dubs the “smart feature phone revolution,” especially in developing countries—which, he notes, is an important way in which the Internet is made available to many users at the bottom of the pyramid (James, 2020). Increasingly, there appear “hybrid” phones that incorporate as many smartphone features—especially in relation to mobile Internet, data, and apps—as is possible for a cheap and robust phone (Purnell, 2019). These hybrids include the JioPhone, provided by the Indian provider Jio, or phones using the KaiOs, such as those produced in partnership with Orange in Africa and the Middle East. Hence such feature phones do offer popular apps, for example Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google Search, Google Maps, as well as money transfer and other services. However, these apps can be difficult to use, given the constraints in computing power and hardware capability, as well as the challenges of connectivity and cost. We do not know very much about the nature and extent of app use in feature phones (James, 2020). This said, it is fair to say that the dialectic between the “have less” and the “have more” sections of the world’s mobile communication users is ongoing. This tension casts the apps—their role, the place where we think they fit into our media—in a different light. It underscores that where the smartphone, the feature phone, and mobile communication in general will go in the coming years is an open question, but one that will be especially consequential for the future of apps.

While synonymous with mobile communication, apps are also used with a growing range of other hardware. Many mobile apps are adapted and deployed for desktop and laptop computer use, and vice-versa. Leading brands, from Microsoft through Apple to Google, make a virtue of the fact that their apps work across the ecosystem of devices—especially the troika of mobile, tablet, and desktops or laptops. Other hardware for which apps have been systematically developed and widely used are tablets, TV sets, and watches and other “wearables.” Apps also feature in technologies such as cars, fridges, homes, gaming devices, VR headsets, and voice-activated devices such as Amazon’s Alexa and Google Home. With the developments referred to as the Internet of Things, apps have acquired the potential to be designed for and installed in a range of low-power devices. They need to be customized for particular kinds of equipment and configurations, as each technology has different characteristics, architecture, affordances, contexts, and uses.

From understanding the nature and ecologies of the hardware, let’s turn now to considering apps as software. Apps are programs written in code. They consist of a collection of files that are downloaded by users and installed on devices. Once installed, apps execute code to gather resources, initiate events, and make things happen. In doing so, they marshal the capabilities of smartphones and the power of computers. They do so via mediating layers of codes, services, application frameworks, application programming interfaces (APIs), and so on. Central to these software environments is the operating system (OS), which orchestrates the software, the code and its compilation, and the hardware.

We can grasp these OSs as a series or stack of layers that allow apps (and their developers and users) to best avail themselves of the capabilities and affordances of the smartphone and, through it, of the various devices, networks, software, things, data, and so on to which it is connected. Increasingly, smartphones are a critical and generative node in wider platforms. What we, as users, experience as apps is a veritable tip of the iceberg. The breakthrough in mobile apps was the creation of these platforms as powerful, supportive, easy-to-use app development environments, typically operated by companies that own or are custodians of an OS. As we shall explore further, especially in chapter 3, companies such as Google, Apple, and others allow developers to avail themselves of their software developer kits, their OS environment, and their services and then to offer apps via an app store (often associated with an OS owner, too). This is the kind of thing introduced in software and app development manuals that target the novice developer; these manuals typically set an exercise such as making a flashlight app or a “beer advisor” app.

The app development environments offered by OS providers have evolved, over the 15 or so years of their existence, to offer comprehensive support for a wide range of tedious, difficult, or costly aspects of developing, versioning, upgrading, and deploying apps across multiple device configurations. So much of the hard work of app development is “blackboxed”—especially for small developers, who can take many things off the shelf, as it were. There are many unrealized, largely invisible aspects of these hinterlands of app software and computing environments; and they are due to the growing complexity, scale, and yoking together of different technologies in the digital platforms. So a customer seeking to grow her or his business by developing her or his own app is reliant on an assemblage of digital media and communication. Thus the single app and its potential users and communities fit into a global picture, which is of course much larger. More on this later.

So far in this section I have been sketching an anatomy of an app. Apps are software that rests upon layers of other software, all ultimately written in code, and all collectively drive the machine of smartphones and other devices to undertake what Lucy Suchman famously called “situated actions” (Suchman, 2007). Among the many things that apps marshal, one that looms large is data. Data from smartphones have special links with personal and collective information.

If we recall the predecessor technology of the telephone, information about subscribers was most systematically known by the phone company, and it was gathered and made available in directories. The calling patterns were typically studied by engineers in telephone companies to inform their design and planning of network capacity and distribution. The content of conversations held during telephone calls and the calling parties themselves could either be overheard, on party wires or via the operator, or listened in through telephone interception or phone tapping (Goggin, 2006). Such interception was possible with mobile phones as well, although encryption made it more difficult. However, with mobile phones came the widespread sharing and collection of telephone numbers: the preciousness of this identifying personal information is underscored by its role in money transfer apps or in messaging apps such as WhatsApp or WeChat. As they evolved, mobile phones gathered and brought to maturation many other sources of data in the smartphone era.

Especially important are location data, which are obtained via technologies such as cellular network triangulation, GPS, and Bluetooth. Thanks to their portability and intimate relationship with their users, smartphones offer rich data for following these users’ daily journeys and for approximating their locations. Many apps have been developed to take advantage of location data, the general arc moving from dedicated apps (e.g. check-in apps such as Foursquare, or map apps such as Waze) to incorporation of location data features in a wide range of other apps, especially social media ones.

Then there are data about people’s bodies and bodily states. These are the kinds of data used by health and wellness apps. Such data are directly gathered from the sensors contained in smartphones, as we have just seen. Many of them are used inferentially—for instance in apps that monitor, gauge, and arbitrate sleeping patterns, the amounts and quality of exercise and physical activity, health, well-being, or any kind of behavior; and they often do so problematically (Barnett et al., 2018). During the COVID-19 pandemic, health researchers, medical practitioners, and developers sought to develop apps that would assist in the diagnosis of positive cases on the basis of data from sensors. Some apps encourage people to enter these data themselves, as in a diary or journal.

One of the major axes of smartphone data is the connection between the app that runs on the smartphone and what is accessed, transferred, and collected, be it via networks, via databases, or via people and other things. Apps have a communicative function, accessing data from elsewhere or sending their data to a server, a database, or a repository elsewhere—which is dramatized in the development and discussion of cloud computing. The rise of apps has been enabled by the rise of cloud computing. Many apps are designed for, and rely upon, the cloud (Sitaram & Manjunath, 2012). Key cloud-based apps include the Google suite of apps, Microsoft Office, and many health apps (Woodward, 2016). So the “appification” of mobile communication has been powered by the rise of the cloud (Stawski, 2015). There is a spectrum of such implementations, from the many apps running on mobile and other devices that draw data from and use the services and capabilities (e.g. machine learning, AI, virtual machines) of cloud-based platforms such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) (Mishra, 2018), to cloud apps and cloud app marketplaces (Nguyen et al., 2016).

Another category of data is transactional data, which are generated when we make a purchase or book a ticket. There are also data on the activities we perform with apps. Watching a video via Netflix on a smartphone or tablet generates data that are held remotely as well as locally, and are “synced up” (i.e. updated) with one’s account. More and more areas of everyday life require apps for participation: there is now, for example, check-in to places via quick response (QR) code, which is designed to enable infectious disease tracing in the COVID-19 pandemic through social media and search apps; and there can be requirements to book a swimming pool spot or do banking or money transfer via an app. Given such developments, many more data about people, their lives, and their environments are gathered by or pass through apps. This dataphilic quality of apps is not only defining, by now it is well nigh constitutional of apps.

Hence the constant struggle to staunch the flow of “leaky apps” (Ball, 2014; Cadwalladr & Graham-Harrison, 2014), and to put in place safeguards that can regulate the data gathering, data use, and data sharing done by people’s main devices or by apps operated by better known brands and by companies with third-party apps or providers. This was (and remains) the nub of the problem with the 2018 revelations that exposed Facebook’s sharing of user data with the Cambridge Analytica company. The Facebook scandal was but one of many instances of data breaches, poor practices, and lack of adequate legal and regulatory frameworks and redress that have made privacy and data governance a burning issue of our time. By turns, apps are at the frontline of concerns about both private companies’ and the government’s use of personal data for profiling, tracking, and surveillance.