I come from a world where all code is software, in order to distinguish it from hardware.

The way to tell is that you can kick the hardware.

That works perfectly fine with old boxed software too. And by jove, have I kicked a lot of software.

Hmm, I've been "kicking" software for years:

    /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Yes... apps are just a subset of software. Apple has used the term Applications since the early days of the Mac. The OS X dictionary defines them this way:

"a program or piece of software designed and written to fulfill a particular purpose of the user"

There was a time when desktop applications were small too. The first version of Photoshop I ever saw, when compressed, fit on an 800K floppy. Apple released the source to MacPaint 1.3, an early Mac application. It's only 67.8K

http://www.computerhistory.org/highlights/macpaint/

iOS apps may have simple interfaces, but the hardware is powerful enough to do many things with. I think VLC is a good example of a non-trivial app. It's much bigger than MacPaint!

http://m.macupdate.com/info.php/id/35314/vlc-media-player

I wonder how different Apple's success would have been had they called it the Software Store rather than the App Store.

If it was in their corporate DNA to name something like the App Store the "Software Store," they would have died out in the 90's making a Windows clone.

"App" is perfectly natural for Apple, given that OS X applications (and NeXT apps before) have the extension .app

Apps are not software ---for certain constrained definitions of "apps" and "software"

Eh, we'd have always written software that small if we could have managed to get paid for it.

The reason apps are special is that you can get payment for them without credit card and support fees blowing you out of the water. That wasn't a possibility before.

I never paid 30% to a credit card company, and apps certainly come with a support burden.

I'd argue the biggest difference is in the ease of installation. The big thing Apple has done is figure out how to take disparate software and make setup easy and automatic. That's were the support benefits come in. When selling software for Windows, Mac, or even Palm you spent most of your support budget just helping people install it.

Beyond that, however, the economics of the app store certainly aren't better than what we traditionally had. There are literally thousands of 'small apps' that have been sold for as long as the internet has existed. The various MP3 players (like winamp) spring to mind immediately.

The only difference with the app-store is that discoverability is a whole lot harder and the downward pricing pressure has meant that traditional advertising works pretty poorly (it's hard to buy traffic when your conversion is $1).

You'd pay more than 30 cents to many companies to process a 99 cent payment, 31.9 cents for google checkout for instance.

The micropayments are what's solved via the app store.

You also do not have to host the app your self, so your not paying for the bandwidth. That cost is included in the 30% cut apple takes.

That's a really small cost, however. Bandwidth is stupid cheap.

During the 90s there was a popular new development process called Rapid Application Development (RAD). Sort of a predecessor to agile methods.

Now it seems we have Rapid Application Consumption. Funny how things change.

Apps are a special case of software in general behaving more often like media and less often like tools.