Is the word "App" evolving? [closed]

This is something that really gets my goat; a couple of years ago, the word "App", to the majority of people, meant "Applet" or 'small, simple, mobile application', i.e. software coded specifically for mobile devices. To me, this is a clear, understandable definition.

Previous question from 2011: Appropriate use of “app” vs “application”

Now, however, windows has started annoyingly calling any program an "app" and it seems to be spreading.

Definition from Internet Slang (.com):

The Meaning of APP:
APP means "Application (computer program)"

Definition from Cambridge Dictionary (.com):

• ABBREVIATION for application: a computer program that is designed for a particular purpose:
  You can run an app on your PC that will find the files and burn them to a CD.

• ABBREVIATION for application: a computer program or piece of software designed for a particular purpose that you can download onto a mobile phone or other mobile device:
  There are apps for everything, from learning a language to booking movie tickets.

Definition from Dictionary (.com):

• An application, typically a small, specialized program downloaded onto mobile devices:
  The best GPS apps for your iPhone.

Origin of app:
1985-90; shortening of application
...

British Dictionary definitions for app

• (computing, informal) short for application program

_{Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 2012 Digital Edition © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012}
...
Related Abbreviations for app:

• [software] application

Are these remnants of the original, lesser-known "application" abbreviation, which it seems was mostly used by professionals? Or is it a new meaning, brought forward by the awful desktop/tablet "hybrid" operating systems i.e. windows 8/10? If it's the latter, then to me, it seems that the word is to be made redundant, and there is no longer a common word to distinguish between a desktop program and a mobile device-specific program.

Note that almost all uses of the word "app" on the internet today are referring to an applet. Will this change in the next few years?

I think you've already demonstrated that the answer to your question is yes, the meaning is changing. But I don't know if I agree with many of the distinctions you're making.

These distinctions were arbitrary to start with, so it's hard to argue for or against any particular "rule" about what's an application versus what's an app or applet or widget or program or... you get the point. How many lines of code does an app have to be before it's an application? How many functions or features or users or... you get the point again.

You can argue for your particular understanding all you want, but I'm not sure who you're appealing to. It's not like there's a single all-powerful group who has the final say on what a word means.

I understand your annoyance, because a lot of this comes down to branding. It can feel like the marketers are taking "our" words and misusing them to appeal to mass markets, but the truth is that we never had any "rights" to define these words in the first place.

So, sure, the words are changing meaning. As they slip into the more common vernacular, the specific meaning that we originally assigned to them gets muddled.

Then again, that's also a result of the concepts themselves being muddled. Nowadays it's more meaningful to differentiate where the application or app is running: desktop app vs server app vs mobile app. We no longer have a big distinction between huge applications running on a mainframe and small apps running on local machines.

After all, we're all carrying around computers that are more powerful than the computers that got us to the moon. That's progress for you.

Edit: You can use Google Trends to see the rise of the term app:

This corresponds pretty obviously with the release of the iPhone and the popularization of mobile apps. As more people used mobile devices and became familiar with the term app, its meaning became more general.

Looking at it a slightly different way, you can see app rise in popularity along with mobile, iphone, and android, as terms like computer (and desktop) slowly fall.

So, yes, the meaning of these words is changing, as they become more popular and more general. But on the other hand, the concepts behind these words are also changing, as we really no longer have a useful distinction between applications and apps (if the distinction was ever useful to begin with).

You seem to be blaming Windows for this shift in popularity and meaning, but I would argue that it has much more to do with the rise of mobile devices (not to mention Apple's "there's an app for that" advertising campaign). But I'm not sure that it really matters, since there really isn't a huge difference between phones and computers anymore anyway.

Note that "app" meant application before there were mobile apps. For example Java web applications predate mobile apps, and the XML config files were like this:

<web-app>
   ...
</web-app>

I started building those around 1999 or 2000.

And applets were around at least as far back as 1996 or 1997--and "applet" meant "little application", where normal applications were desktop applications. So I don't think Microsoft's use of the word is ahistorical.

Today many people (sounds like you might be one of them) think of "app" in a narrower sense, as in mobile apps. So yeah, "app" is evolving.

Yes the word is evolving. Appplet was also an HTML tag used to enclose a small Java program. Since you would not include a huge program in a web page it gained the connotation of a small application program.

Corporates such as Apple and Google then adopted the term "app" to mean a program that you could download, particularly onto a mobile device, to perform a specific purpose without necessarily being written in Java. The place you downloaded it from, under corporate financial control, became the "app store".

In recent years Windows has launched and consolidated its own app store for devices running Windows. I suggest this was a business decision to attract new users or retain existing users who were already using "app" to mean downloadable program and unlikely to call an "app store" anything else.

In summary "app" is well under way to rivalling "program" as the generic term for a computer application, with the main impetus for the change coming from the marketing and advertising output of major international corporations. But English is a living language that changes and this is just one example of change at work