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
