FCJ-181 There’s a History for That: Apps and Mundane Software as Commodity

With global app sales estimated at $25 billion in 2013 and thousands of software developers marketing all manner of services and products as apps, it is hard to deny the importance of software applications for smartphones and other mobile computing devices as an economic and cultural platform.While apps provide many functions previously possible with software, apps represent a new way of producing and packaging software.This article traces a lineage of the term app within the context of the software commodity's longer history.We argue apps, as mundane software, represent a particular affective and contextual experience of software that expands the potential uses of software but also embeds it more deeply in everyday practices.