Apps. Gerard Goggin

producers, and intermediaries. Digital platforms involve systems that take advantage of the massive growth of data, using machine learning, algorithms, and AI. They also link new digital technologies: location tech, social media, mobile media, research, machine learning, AI, sensors, and the Internet of Things. Crucially, digital platforms create powerful network effects, which are gains that the network and other infrastructures offer to each new user, because she or he can access already existing users (Gillespie, 2010, 2018; Mansell & Steinmuller, 2020; Srnicek, 2019; van Dijck et al., 2018). Among other things, such digital platforms are often associated with new kinds of (digital) work and labor, as well as with intensive new roles for consumers and users (e.g. the roles involved in the ratings and rankings evident on many platforms such as Uber, Airbnb, or Airtasker).

      Apps play an important role in many digital platforms. In the first place, they provide functionalities and benefits, including friendly and relatively familiar ways for users to access, negotiate, use, and participate in digital platforms (Ashlin et al., 2020). In addition, apps are vital in discourses of digital platforms (cf. Gillespie, 2010), mainly because they often are a prime selling point for these platforms. Consider, for instance, how smart cities developments—including what is called “platform urbanism” (Barns, 2020)—feature apps as a way to emphasize the seamless and beneficial incorporation of citizens and consumers; or consider how digital government initiatives highlight apps.

      The research, public, and policy debates on digital platforms also help us sharpen up our understanding of apps and their stakes. It has often been difficult to get a handle on the politics of apps, or on their social or design implications. This is especially the case because concern and inquiry have centered on individual apps or classes of apps, such as health, medical, and dating apps. The incorporation of apps into digital platforms has highlighted the underlying systems, digital ecologies, and economies they support and to which they belong.

Overview

In laying out the coordinates of apps, the book proceeds as follows.

      In chapter 2, “What’s an App?,” I give a working definition of apps and look at the histories and important predecessors of apps that have shaped them today. I also outline the forms and functions of apps and their importance to contemporary media and society.

      Chapter 3, “App Economy,” lays out the fundamental elements we need if we wish to understand global app economies, industries, and systems of value and control. I seek to establish apps as eminently international media technologies in their economic, industrial, and power structures. While it often seems that the key players are Apple, Google, and others that are headquartered in North America, Europe, or the United Kingdom, apps are very much a global, regional, local, and international phenomenon. I follow the story of the economics, politics, and forms of apps by interrogating the striking transformations wrought in recent years by the rise of other regions and countries that challenge the dominance of the western app stores and tech companies. After exploring China’s app stores and app market, I move to a discussion of how that country and various other Asian markets are innovating to create new forms and business models for apps in the form of mini apps and super apps—forms and models that promise to lessen consumer and business reliance on the “bottleneck” infrastructure of the app store.

In chapter 4, “App Media,” we change the pace and focus on apps as media. In particular, I consider the ways in which apps reshape the boundaries of how we regard and experience media. With their flexibility, ductility, and indispensable role in the weaving of contemporary networked digital media, apps break new ground and open up new modes for us to make things, connect, create meaning, forge social action, engage in our cultures, and mediate. I look at apps as a multimedia and multimodal computational software, which operates as a kind of modern-day kaleidoscope. In relatively quick succession, I discuss app media as contributing to, being constituted by, and in various and often connected forms partaking in games media, locative media, realities media (virtual, augmented, mixed), photo and image apps and app visualities, moving image media, sound media, message media, and something I call “quotidian voice media.”

      In chapter 5, “Social Laboratories of Apps,” I discuss the significant ways in which apps go well beyond the previous boundaries of media, spanning across the gamut of social realms. As I shall show, apps are framed and propelled by their actors to act as something of a laboratory of the social. They extend the qualities, the repertoire, and the immersive and catalytic role of digital media and communications, as this formerly specific and relatively enclosed area has scribbled over and redrawn the dividing lines between public and private spheres and has spurred new roles for and dependencies upon technology in our lives, other species, and our collective environments. The chapter focuses on four especially revealing areas, where apps have functioned as social laboratories of various kinds: health and well-being; money, especially payment systems, remittance and money transfer, banking, and FinTech apps; consumption, especially in the area of shopping apps; and relationships in the categories of dating and hookup apps.

In the concluding chapter 6, “After Apps,” I move to ideas of the future and discuss how apps function as a resource and a prompt for the imagining, planning, and politics of the future. What, for instance, is the anticipated and emerging role of apps as a golden thread in visions and plans of the Internet of Things, 5G networks, and next-generation AI-supported infrastructures and technology and social systems? An overarching thread in this chapter is the need to critically evaluate the kinds of claims and discourses in which apps feature, especially in order to better ground, understand, and reimagine the social futures and values that are inscribed in and through apps. I bring together the key arguments of the book, discussing the place of apps on the wider scene of digital media and society. As the chapter suggests, apps are but one area in a sprawling set of digital transformations. Yet critical attention to apps is key to our understanding of digital societies.

chapter two What’s an App?

      What’s an app, and what’s an app store? As we have already seen, apps are obvious, but tricky to pin down. They are software, but depend on lots of other software, operating systems, hardware, and infrastructures. Then there are all the social conditions and dynamics that go into making apps possible—let alone useful and compelling, for their users and for social life. In this foundational chapter, then, I aim to provide a working definition of apps, to explain how they work and where they fit and bridge wider digital media and society.

      In the first part I will give an anatomy of an app, looking at its main parts, what its functions are, and how apps fit into software, hardware, and other key technology systems. To understand the significance of apps as a social and technical accomplishment, it is useful to know a bit about their history and development. So, in the second part I look at predecessor technologies. I focus on histories of mobile technologies, especially handheld devices such as calculators, palm pilots, and portable digital assistants (PDAs), and then on mobile phones, but also on the network and software associated with these systems. This provides a context for understanding the smartphone moment in 2007–2009, which saw the launch of the iPhone, of Google’s Android operating system, and of app stores and eventually an avalanche of apps and associated take-up and innovation across users, organizations, institutions, and developers.

Anatomy of an App

The word “app” is short for “application.” The Oxford English Dictionary gives it this primary meaning:

      A piece of software designed to perform a specific function other than one relating to the operation of the computer itself; esp. (in later use) one designed specifically