What is an "app"? [telecom]

I've never heard it suggested that "app" was shorthand for "Apple". Instead it's short for "application" and is used beyond the iPhone.

John

[Moderator snip]

Visit the Apple Apps Store:

On the first page it states:

"Applications for iPhones are like nothing you've ever seen on a mobile phone. Explore some of our favorite apps here and see how the allow iPhone to do even more."

Apple's culture accepts that today's youth are corrupting our language faster than ever.

1) Those -big- metal things you find in a kitchen ("kitchen liances") 2) What you fill out when applying for a job ("employmemt lication") 3) Something bigger than an 'applet'.

4) a _self-contained_ collection of software for solving some sort of problem, or automating some sort of procedure, on behalf of a computer user. As distinct from 'systems' software, which manages system resources, arbitrates conflicting resource access requests, and ensures that one user's activities do not inadvertantly affect another user's operations.

Smart-phone 'apps' are not really separate "programs" in the traditonal meaning of the word. The 'operating system' for a phone is does not support most of the standard system concepts -- things like 'multi-user', 'multi- progrmming', 'multi-processing', and frequently, not even true 'multi-tasking'. You don't have separate programs that are 'invoked'/'executed' and autonomously run to completion.

Rather, they are routines that are fairly tightly integreated into the operating system of the phone, and can do things even when _not_ 'activated'.

Probably the simplest description of 'what is an app' is that it is a piece of add-on software that does 'something useful' for the user. :)

Actually, Android has all of those things; it's just a really weird Linux distribution, after all. Android apps install in their own "sandbox" user ID, which is distinct from that used by all other apps

-- and this is true even of the "system" apps like "Mail" and "Contacts". Most Android apps are written in Java, and each one running has its own Java Virtual Machine (designed for memory efficiency more than speed); the Android platform libraries provide mechanisms for apps to communicate with each other -- or send broadcasts -- over an internal message bus to request services.

(There's actually a reasonably decent mechanism called "Intents" that allows applications to invoke actions like sending mail or responding to an incoming SMS; in the case of network-generated events, the system sends a broadcast and all apps that have registered an interest in that event get a chance to do their thing. It's very similar to the D-Bus mechanism promoted by freedesktop.org for regular desktops.)

-GAWollman

App is the term Apple uses to describe programs. In Windows they are referred to as programs and with Apple they are called applications or apps for short.