Ask HN: is App an Apple word? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: is App an Apple word?

8 pointssambeau11 comments

There's a discussion going on over at Slashdot about the word App. I'm finding it all a re-write of history. As far as I remember it it went more like this.

* Apple pre-1996 never referred to apps, just Applications. Neither did anyone else.

* Sun, with Java, had Applets. I don't recall them ever being shortened to 'apps'

* When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1996 he brought with him the term 'App'. I remember cringing every time he said it in a Keynote.

My theory is that it's a NeXT term derived from the .app extension. But for this to be true NextStep would have needed .app bundles too (and I can't remember if it did). If not it could also be from the early days of OSX.

EDIT: It seems that NeXTSTEP did have Application Bundles as I had thought: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_Bundle

Does anyone have any concrete evidence why this isn't the case?

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Searching Ngram viewer for "killer app" says maybe:

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=killer+app

It's hard to establish a causal relationship though. Most of the uses of "app" prior to that were shortened versions of "application" as in the "I submitted a job app." sense.

Coming from working at Apple from 2003-2008, we used "app" all the time to refer to software. From that perspective, it seemed like a NeXT thing.

(As an aside, isn't it awesome we live in a time when a tool exists to research word usage across hundreds of years worth of books? Hooray to the future!)

How was the word "app" used 1650-1700?

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=app%2C+applicatio...

Maybe Jobs didn't invent it after all?!

Actually, if you look at the results it's merely an artefact of scanning problems. The gothic 'r' seems to be being misread in words like 'apprehend'

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22app%22&tbs=bks:1,cdr:1...

if you do a similar search for 'ehend' you see a graph showing the usage of gothic dying out!

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=ehend&year_st...

clicking through shows lots of "app-ehend" and "app/ehend"

+1. Awesome!

If you run the search on Google Books, there are definitely 80s usages, though not as many as in the 90s or 2000s: http://www.google.com/search?tbo=p&tbm=bks&q=%22kill...

It was definitely used in the BBS scene in the 80s/90s, but perhaps you're meaning mainstream usage by companies? I seem to recall it originating in the warez scene, where games v. utils v. apps was a common way of sorting software, but it was used more widely than that as well.

Here are some Usenet examples of "DOS app" being used in the 80s: http://groups.google.com/groups/search?as_q=&as_epq=DOS+...

We had an issue quite recently with this regarding the use of "App-Store". APP STORE is a registered trade mark of Apple across the EU. Not sure about "app", but our trademark solicitor made us remove it from our marketing anyway. We're now an "application store", an even that she wasn't happy with, suggesting we use "application shop" instead, as "store" was too synonymous.

Who knows, maybe Apple could even trademark the word "app" if they followed in Facebook's footsteps: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2373258,00.asp

App is short for application.

People use the same abbrevations for things like applying to university

Is Exe a Microsoft word?

EDIT: In my opinion, it's all about context.

Yes. I would say it is - and it definitely got used in exactly the same way.

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