Spent two hours yesterday trying to explain to N what an app is. He asked me a question that makes a modern person’s brain boil, “But what is the point of apps? Why do they exist?”
The Point of Apps
Opinions, art, debate
Opinions, art, debate
Spent two hours yesterday trying to explain to N what an app is. He asked me a question that makes a modern person’s brain boil, “But what is the point of apps? Why do they exist?”
Clarissa's Blog 
That’s what I keep asking too….. and no one ever seems to really have an answer….
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I have not found an answer. Let’s see if anybody else is more successful. 🙂
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Happy holidays. As someone whose cellphone was described by a salesperson as “good for young children, old people, and the technologically innocent,” I don’t know much about apps myself – but people have tried to sell me on the idea of them by telling me that they “do stuff.” Lots of different stuff. Some of them will do useful things like show you a map or keep track of blood sugar level or stocks you’ve invested in (maybe offline, without you needing Internet connection). Others are excellent for procrastination (well, they all are, in a way). And some will mess up your mobile device’s functioning, possibly by introducing malware onto it. They’re good for many things. Part of their appeal is that they’re just there and most people want them, so don’t you want them too?
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I use apps quite a bit but I’m finding it hard to explain why all of the same stuff can’t be done through a browser. Because it spares you the bother of having bookmarks? That’s the best I can come up with.
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Why do you use them then? There must be something, even if it’s just that they’re pleasant. Maybe the explanation won’t sound convincing but there’s probably a reason you like them.
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Apps are application programs on smartphones. That’s it. Smartphones are like tiny computers with the capability to access the internet. However, even the best smartphones don’t have the computing capability of a laptop or a desktop. A complex robust program in which you can do many things would tax a smartphone. Hence many apps are atomized mini programs that used to be included in much larger programs. (I haven’t tried to use an Excel like program on a smartphone yet… but.) You sacrifice power and (privacy) for mobility.
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“Apps are application programs on smartphones. That’s it. Smartphones are like tiny computers with the capability to access the internet. However, even the best smartphones don’t have the computing capability of a laptop or a desktop. A complex robust program in which you can do many things would tax a smartphone. Hence many apps are atomized mini programs that used to be included in much larger programs. (I haven’t tried to use an Excel like program on a smartphone yet… but.) You sacrifice power and (privacy) for mobility.”
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I though the whole point was to make money by targeting a large audience(millions of mobile users) with shared services at a low cost (pennies) as opposed to delivering (high-value high cost ) products/services to (few) on-premises clients.
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The question wasn’t why the companies made apps. It was why people used apps. 🙂
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Right, here’s why you have apps on phones …
Software development is expensive, yet people want little tools that do little things for them. If you try to build these tools on platforms with a lot of software diversity, you wind up coding for things that may happen to a few people on a rainy Tuesday if they’re driving on the A38 with their top down after having eaten a roadside burger with mustard on it.
In other words, they’re highly specific nightmares.
Phones take care of this by attempting to minimise the options available for other vendors to screw up their product. They do this by providing a full development environment that means that each app is more or less “sandboxed”, which means that it relies on standalone deployments of additional tools that aren’t provided by the phone’s OS vendor.
Most of the things that informational apps want to do, for instance, are covered by a set of library functions that take care of such things as grabbing data from a Web interface, for instance, so it’s relatively easy to provide every one of those functions within the OS or within the OS’s “software development kit”, or SDK.
Why you have apps then becomes a function of pricing and cost of development.
It’s easy to code an app for iOS and sell it — the Mac pretty much comes with all of the kit you’ll need for that. Android’s easy with a Linux box — the SDK unpacks all of the API versions you’ll want to target, so it’s possible for many apps to run even on the first Android API version. If you are reasonably decent at design, you can learn the platform as you suffer through trying to develop a new idea — several top-selling apps came about because someone had an idea and that someone was willing to accept the pain and cope.
Anyway, if you have a week’s investment or less in coding, it’s relatively easy to price an app that might sell 20k units at $1.99, or to provide it for “free” if it displays adverts.
You’re not going to have a week’s investment coding anything for MacOSX, Windows, and most especially Linux that has an attractive user interface.
Phones have by default become the best option for small, attractive tools that people like to use. The same is also true of tablets, which in many ways are merely really big phones.
Basically, most people want useful tools that do something they like, and the conventional computer route has made that prohibitively expensive.
Even if all those tools are doing is wrapping an existing Web site with a better, faster, more direct interface, that’s often enough.
That’s why I use the First Great Western app to book tickets out of London to the West Country instead of mucking about with the Web site — besides, that burger place on the A38 is over-rated anyway and I can get a pint at a railway pub. 🙂
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I agree with your husband.
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