Isn 't an app that runs on a desktop a just a (duh!) program?

[G+_George Kozi]

Isn't an app that runs on a desktop a just a (duh!) program?

What's all this nonsense about "desktop apps"?

[G+_Ted Martin]

What is the difference - from your point of view - between a software program and software app?

[G+_George Kozi]

From an end user pov? not much... an app is just a poor skinny relative.  But, to relativise further, everything is relatively relative...

[G+_Ted Martin]

Cool...I consider the terms interchangeable for the most part. Over the past few years Android and iOS have been referring to the programs you download and install on your tablet/phone as apps so the people who use desktops a lot are maybe just adopting the same terminology.

[G+_Clive Parfitt]

George, to give you an example of the difference, in terms of the user experience: I recently looked on Mac App Store for a Lovefilm app, like I have on iOS. I want to use the program as I do on iOS, and watch a streaming movie.

 

I don't want to have to do it via a browser, because I am not trying to multitask with different tabs etc. I just want to watch a film. I was a little disappointed that there wasn't a Mac app, so I used my iPad to watch the film instead.

 

That's a specific use case; I would not want to have my desktop cluttered with a lot of apps, as one sees on iOS.

[G+_Ted Martin]

Clive, would you say that an "App" is usually a single-purpose program that is often only used within a web browser or on a mobile OS like Android/iOS?

 

When I first started using the newer mobile OS's, the biggest difference was how the apps were mostly stand-alone with some basic ways to stitch them together (e.g. Using an RSS feed to find articles of interest and then emailing them to a Read-Later service for a more magazine style reading experience). On the desktop, you'd have a single app/program that you'd get to do all of this for you - run these stand-alone "apps" in the background and just show you the results.

[G+_Ted Martin]

Love it...yes.

[G+_Clive Parfitt]

Ted, yes I would say that I see an App as a single purpose system, often where you receive a service provided by someone else, whereas many software programs are there to provide a function (office software, image processing) and you do with them what you will.

[G+_Ted Martin]

Clive, this is also what I've noticed. I suspect that the reason the mobile operating systems (Android/iOS) tend to work at the "App" level is they are built, basically, on UNIX and that is how it works (you stitch together two or more lower-level apps passing output from one as input the next)

 

For iOS at least, this fits their sandbox approach which limits what any given App can do on iOS. Developers hate it but for users it gives a lot of security and stability.

 

In my opinion, eventually we will have "desktop-quality" systems/programs that can run across stand-alone desktop and mobile environments - it is already starting. I feel that the Mobile OS is still just getting started and this is partly why we have so many apps.

 

Ted

[G+_Rich Koning]

It's just one of the ways technology is being dumbed down for the masses.  I'm waiting for the next revolution to come along since computers and the internet aren't a specialized niche we can call our own anymore.