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In thinking about apps, we can start with work that focuses on the topic. The first dedicated book on apps was Paul D. Miller and Svitlana Matviyenko’s 2014 multicontributor volume The Imaginary App (Miller & Matviyenko, 2014). Matviyenko was the lead editor of another landmark anthology of studies on apps, a 2015 special issue of the journal Fibreculture titled Apps and Affect (Matviyenko et al., 2015). This volume raised questions about the intense relationships that apps have with our bodies and on how we feel, perceive, and know things. The next milestone in app research was Jeremy Wade Morris and Sarah Murray’s 2018 multicontributor volume Appified, which looked at the ways in which apps fit into and shape contemporary media and culture in general: “[A]pps represent not just a fashionable tech trend but a new way of accessing information, experiencing media, mediating commerce, and understanding the self and others” (Morris & Murray, 2018, p. 19). The fourth milestone is an ambitious effort to create methods for app studies; it comes from various researchers gathered under the banner of the App Studies Initiative who give us the following message:

Apps are designed to perform as concrete software objects but are continually transformed … the notion of apps as entirely self-contained also belies their involvement in the data flows of multi-sided platforms and their necessary entanglement with varying hardware devices and digital infrastructures that make their operations at once possible and, indeed, valuable. (Dieter et al., 2019, p. 2)

In addition to these four landmarks in app studies, extensive research on apps has been carried out and distributed across the reaches of many disciplines and fields, much of which I have consulted and drawn upon in the following chapters (insofar as space permitted).

It can be helpful to approach apps as a relatively recent development in the broader field of mobile communications and media. Scholars have theorized mobile communications and media as a new phase of communication technology and society (Katz & Aakhus, 2002; Ling, 2012). A range of cultural and media researchers have been especially interested in the way in which mobile communication unfolds, takes shape, and is imagined, used, and adapted in social and cultural contexts. Drawing on a wide range of traditions, and especially on cultural studies, researchers have contributed a rich body of work on the cultural dimensions of mobile media (Goggin, 2008). They have sought to understand the intensity and the reach of mobile media across social and individual life. There has been a symbiosis between smartphones and apps in their mass diffusion phase: “[S]martphones have changed the way we communicate … smartphones are structured into the very way that we coordinate society … The ‘appification’ of mobile communication is one of the key transitions in the development of the smartphone” (Rich et al., 2020, pp. 3, 9; see also Jin, 2017).

While apps have taken shape via other digital technologies such as smartphones, at the most fundamental level they are a form of software. They are constituted via programming and coding, which have materialities that shape the design, implementations, and effects of apps, as the case of news shows us (Weber & Kosterich, 2018). Since the emergence of software studies, theories and research around software have moved beyond grappling with the complexity of software and attempted especially to pinpoint its pivotal and catalytic role in the creation of digital media.

Apps have reshaped the Internet and how we experience it—especially because their emergence coincides with the rise of social media. Many of the most popular apps are social media apps such as the popular Facebook, Twitter, Weibo, or Instagram services. Social media apps foster what José van Dijck has called a “culture of connectivity” (van Dijck, 2013). They also make it hard for us to disconnect from digital networks (Hesselberth, 2018). Many social media services started as Internet services or as pre-smartphone mobile services. This includes Facebook, which many users experience and think of as a mobile app, not as an Internet-based software for a desktop or laptop computer. With mobile media, especially smartphones, come the kinds of affordances that offer different inventions and appropriations of social media, notably portability, availability, locatability, and multimediality, as Andrew Schrock argues (Schrock, 2015). The mix of connectivity and affordances is taken in new directions by messaging apps such as Line, WeChat, and WhatsApp, to mention but a few.

From the trajectory of apps, we can also return to fundamental questions of media and communication. What kind of medium is an app? And what kind of communication does it enact or support? Apps are also a barometer and conduit for emerging directions in media of various sorts—such as sensory, haptic, audio, and sound media, as well as other kinds, less well recognized in high modernist media studies. Apps spurred new ways of thinking about media and media objects, for instance post-phenomenological approaches (Ash, 2018).

If nothing else, the rise of apps has been underpinned by an extraordinary growth in data and by the increasing role that smartphones and apps play in the new data infrastructures, economy, ecologies, and cultures. So here we find a range of critical work on data helpful for understanding apps. This work encompasses the part they play in surveillance (Thurman, 2018); the concept of data colonialism, including the compulsory nature of data enlistment, and the stakes in disconnection (Couldry & Mejias, 2019); the sociology of data selves and identities (Lupton, 2016, 2020); data sharing and social practices (Grundy et al., 2019); the leaky nature of data and the fragmented contexts of apps (Wilmott, 2016).

Apps have been significantly transformed and reconfigured by the rise of algorithms, AI, machine learning, and automation and by users’ iterative interactions with these technologies. Apps themselves are shaped by algorithms: the ranking of apps by app stores, or the co-construction of social categories and relationships such as “friendship” or intimacy, are cases in point (see Chambers, 2017; Wang, 2020a). As for automation, it turns out that many apps, despite their intentions and design, are surprisingly unautomated—hence the ongoing issue of the relationship between human actions and automation has a strong purchase in relation to apps as well (Gervasio, 2019). Thus apps play an important role in understanding the nature and place of algorithms in contemporary media (Galloway, 2006; Gillespie, 2014; Neyland, 2019; Striphas, 2015) and in the conduct and governance of culture and of everyday life (Latzer & Festic, 2019). Scholars in critical algorithm studies have pointed to a range of problems caused by the growing dependence on, and indeed design premised upon, algorithms and apps. This aspect is captured in Sara Wachter-Boettcher’s 2017 book Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech (Wachter-Boettcher, 2017). Various scholars have investigated the role of apps in reinforcing social inequalities and injustice, including those related to race (Benjamin, 2019; Poster, 2019).

A stumbling block here is the way in which apps are used, at least in much public discourse, to frame a familiar, welcoming user perspective on emerging technology developments. Also challenging is the way in which apps are conjoined with algorithms in promises of brighter, seductive social futures, and also in their dystopian, dark sides. An excellent example of this can be seen in imaginaries and in plans for future smart cities (Green, 2019), or in the area of digital government and service delivery—what Paul Henman dubs “digital social policy” (Henman, 2019).

An important shift in the nature of apps has occurred with the arrival of “digital platforms.” Now in their ascendancy, digital platforms represent a new phase for apps. They have their origins in the different computer operating systems and software of the 1980s and 1990s, such as Windows and Apple. Games platforms also appeared; they represent another kind of “platform wars”—for instance, rivalries between Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft and, later, between streaming providers such as Twitch (Taylor, 2018), Facebook Gaming, and YouTube Gaming. Games had a formative role in the invention of creative and computational aspects of digital platforms (Andreessen, 2007; Bogost & Monfort 2009).

Platforms are significant because they integrate various things that make them compelling for their users. While digital platforms take different forms, commonly they are corporately or privately owned infrastructure, enclosed or semi-closed systems, and offer new ways to connect the various sides of markets—consumers, producers, and intermediaries. Digital platforms involve systems that take advantage of the massive growth of data, using machine learning, algorithms, and AI. They also link new digital technologies: location tech, social media, mobile media, research, machine learning, AI, sensors, and the Internet of Things. Crucially, digital platforms create powerful network effects, which are gains that the network and other infrastructures offer to each new user, because she or he can access already existing users (Gillespie, 2010, 2018; Mansell & Steinmuller, 2020; Srnicek, 2019; van Dijck et al., 2018). Among other things, such digital platforms are often associated with new kinds of (digital) work and labor, as well as with intensive new roles for consumers and users (e.g. the roles involved in the ratings and rankings evident on many platforms such as Uber, Airbnb, or Airtasker).

Apps play an important role in many digital platforms. In the first place, they provide functionalities and benefits, including friendly and relatively familiar ways for users to access, negotiate, use, and participate in digital platforms (Ashlin et al., 2020). In addition, apps are vital in discourses of digital platforms (cf. Gillespie, 2010), mainly because they often are a prime selling point for these platforms. Consider, for instance, how smart cities developments—including what is called “platform urbanism” (Barns, 2020)—feature apps as a way to emphasize the seamless and beneficial incorporation of citizens and consumers; or consider how digital government initiatives highlight apps.

The research, public, and policy debates on digital platforms also help us sharpen up our understanding of apps and their stakes. It has often been difficult to get a handle on the politics of apps, or on their social or design implications. This is especially the case because concern and inquiry have centered on individual apps or classes of apps, such as health, medical, and dating apps. The incorporation of apps into digital platforms has highlighted the underlying systems, digital ecologies, and economies they support and to which they belong.