I remember “Applications” being used for software in the 90s, so the only thing that’s new is how it has supplanted the other synonyms, probably through its use via the iPhone.
My computer illiterate mother in-law is familiar with the word “app” because of the iPhone. In this way it has been the iPhone that has made “app” so much more mainstream than it had been previously.
Another vote for 15 years ago or so, for those of us who uhm, knew people who were into the warez.
I used to think I was the absolute shit when I procured a copy of the “Colin’s Killer Apps” CD that was exclusive to the IT department where I interned in the late 90s (not in the IT department). Colin being the lead IT guy. I actually still use my copy of Homesite from that disc!
Homesite! Hah!
I’m pretty sure the debut of the iphone is responsible for the surge in popularity.
I’ve never heard the word ‘app’ used for regular applications though - only for mini applications, or applications for a very narrow purpose, or those for a mobile device. Regular applications are just called… applications, or programs, or software/shareware.
I first heard it in the 80s, from some old school Commodore BBSes.
I thought it was somewhat well-known by the late-90s in the usage “killer app.” It was in regular use in the mainstream media when reporting on technology. Doing a google news search, I see a number of Chicago Tribune articles from 1992, and once you hit about 1998, the usage becomes mainstream.
But, yes, it wasn’t until the iPhone that it became really mainstream.
I still use Homesite, though it’s the latest version (i.e. circa 2003). It’s underrated, and was criminally ignored by Macromedia when it bought Allaire, and then by Adobe. It’s far and away better than Dreamweaver, and always has been.
At some point–I’m not quite sure when, but it was before the mid-90s–everybody seemed to want to avoid using the word “program”. Programs, even utilities and add-ons, became applications if they weren’t part of the operating system. Programming was no longer done, either… coding was.
In the end, computer programmers did not program computer programs. Developers coded applications, instead.
I was always under the impression that apps were smaller than applications, sorta like applets. I know we used appz, but that shouldn’t count, since we also use wares, and yet I’ve never heard anyone abbreviate software as ware.
Looking at what’s been posted in this thread it seems that ‘app’ became mainstream around 15 years ago.
However, although known by a lot of people it wasn’t a word that got an enormous amount of use.
With the introduction of the iphone the word has become much more commonly used, hence the graphs that have been presented.
Maybe we should be asking ourselves, “what’s the definition of mainstream?”
Indeed.
Does 200 million people using a word once a month make it mainstream?
Does 40 million people using it 5 times a month qualify?
It seems to me that the current situation is that a relatively small (although, in absolute terms quite large) number of people are now talking about ‘apps’ a lot whereas before the iphone a relatively large number of people were talking about them relatively rarely.
Once it was just a useful word to differentiate between OS and ‘systems’ programs and ‘applications’, whereas now it’s something of a buzzword.
When I became a programmer in 1988, the standard description for my job in government and industry in the US was “applications programmer”. I wrote programs that were used by or produced reports for end-users. These were called applications, not apps.
I think the original “killer app” was VisCalc, a crude spreadsheet application that was developed for the Apple II in 1979.
It wasn’t until the introduction of the iphone that I heard the word app on what seems like a daily basis.
Lotus 1-2-3 was declared a “killer app” when it was released in 1983, long before e-mail clients.
I think it is mostly the spread of Mac-centric language carried by iPhone to the PC-using world. As others have said, we’ve always called them Applications on the Mac. NO ONE refers to Photoshop, iTunes, Safari, Word, Excel, or even things like Disk Utility or the Console as “Programs”. They’re “Applications”. Just a convention of the platform. Anyway, it got exported in large part by iPhone (and iPad and iPod etc) so now more people use that term.
I remember the first time I head it used in popular culture. It was in the first episode of this rather bad 1995 sitcom:
Peter Scolari’s character was bouncing up and down on the office trampoline and was explaining to some new hire that he was inventing the next killer app. I think he then went on to explain what a killer app is. I very much doubt that was the first use in popular culture though.
App for application was common when I started using computers in the late 70s to early 80s, but only amongst computer literate people (a tiny minority at the time). As the population of the computer literate expanded, the number of people using it expanded. The only relevant issue to answer the OP, therefore, is “How do you define mainstream? What percentage of the total population? Can it be mainstream if a majority of people under 40 use it, but not a majority of the total population?”
The time “killer app” started appearing in mainstream publications is not a good definition, for the simple reason that “killer” is a modifier of “app”, implying that there were a significant number of people (the target audience) who would understand what you’re saying because they already knew what an “app” (without the “killer” modifier) was.
Semi-related hijack: What about “solution”? I’ve seen that term pop up when reading about software, and I personally find it jarring when an article or the documentation keeps referring to the software as “the solution”, especially when I can’t see any reason to not use the terms “the application” or “the program”.
The closest guess I’ve been able to come up with is that “solution” typically refers to custom software written to “solve” a specific client’s needs, but I’ve seen the term applied to some off-the-shelf software as well.
The Jargon File backs up the Lotus 1-2-3 claim as being the first “killer app” in the mid 1980s:
http://catb.org/jargon/html/K/killer-app.html
The term “app” itself was certainly used by computer programmers prior to this, but not in the mainstream computer press.
Of course Apple’s introduction of the “App Store” and “there’s an app for that” took it much more mainstream.
“Solution” has been heavily popularized by FileMaker. Not necessarily exclusively by them but the idea seems to be consistent. A “Solution” is not something created by geeks & nerds coding in C++ or equivalent but is instead created using end user Applications. Thus, FileMaker Pro is an “Application” but the database I create with it to manage your company’s work flow is a “Solution”. Excel is an “Application” but the workbook the HR manager creates to manage annual vacation days with carryover from the previous year is a “Solution”. Etc.