Overview
In laying out the coordinates of apps, the book proceeds as follows.
In chapter 2, “What’s an App?,” I give a working definition of apps and look at the histories and important predecessors of apps that have shaped them today. I also outline the forms and functions of apps and their importance to contemporary media and society.
Chapter 3, “App Economy,” lays out the fundamental elements we need if we wish to understand global app economies, industries, and systems of value and control. I seek to establish apps as eminently international media technologies in their economic, industrial, and power structures. While it often seems that the key players are Apple, Google, and others that are headquartered in North America, Europe, or the United Kingdom, apps are very much a global, regional, local, and international phenomenon. I follow the story of the economics, politics, and forms of apps by interrogating the striking transformations wrought in recent years by the rise of other regions and countries that challenge the dominance of the western app stores and tech companies. After exploring China’s app stores and app market, I move to a discussion of how that country and various other Asian markets are innovating to create new forms and business models for apps in the form of mini apps and super apps—forms and models that promise to lessen consumer and business reliance on the “bottleneck” infrastructure of the app store.
In chapter 4, “App Media,” we change the pace and focus on apps as media. In particular, I consider the ways in which apps reshape the boundaries of how we regard and experience media. With their flexibility, ductility, and indispensable role in the weaving of contemporary networked digital media, apps break new ground and open up new modes for us to make things, connect, create meaning, forge social action, engage in our cultures, and mediate. I look at apps as a multimedia and multimodal computational software, which operates as a kind of modern-day kaleidoscope. In relatively quick succession, I discuss app media as contributing to, being constituted by, and in various and often connected forms partaking in games media, locative media, realities media (virtual, augmented, mixed), photo and image apps and app visualities, moving image media, sound media, message media, and something I call “quotidian voice media.”
In chapter 5, “Social Laboratories of Apps,” I discuss the significant ways in which apps go well beyond the previous boundaries of media, spanning across the gamut of social realms. As I shall show, apps are framed and propelled by their actors to act as something of a laboratory of the social. They extend the qualities, the repertoire, and the immersive and catalytic role of digital media and communications, as this formerly specific and relatively enclosed area has scribbled over and redrawn the dividing lines between public and private spheres and has spurred new roles for and dependencies upon technology in our lives, other species, and our collective environments. The chapter focuses on four especially revealing areas, where apps have functioned as social laboratories of various kinds: health and well-being; money, especially payment systems, remittance and money transfer, banking, and FinTech apps; consumption, especially in the area of shopping apps; and relationships in the categories of dating and hookup apps.
In the concluding chapter 6, “After Apps,” I move to ideas of the future and discuss how apps function as a resource and a prompt for the imagining, planning, and politics of the future. What, for instance, is the anticipated and emerging role of apps as a golden thread in visions and plans of the Internet of Things, 5G networks, and next-generation AI-supported infrastructures and technology and social systems? An overarching thread in this chapter is the need to critically evaluate the kinds of claims and discourses in which apps feature, especially in order to better ground, understand, and reimagine the social futures and values that are inscribed in and through apps. I bring together the key arguments of the book, discussing the place of apps on the wider scene of digital media and society. As the chapter suggests, apps are but one area in a sprawling set of digital transformations. Yet critical attention to apps is key to our understanding of digital societies.
chapter two What’s an App?
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.
Anatomy of an App
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
