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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: DMS - Digital Media and Society
- Sprache: Englisch
Since the rise of the smartphone, apps have become entrenched in billions of users' daily lives. Accessible across phones and tablets, watches and wearables, connected cars, sensors, and cities, they are an inescapable feature of our current culture.
In this book, Gerard Goggin provides a comprehensive and authoritative guide to the development of apps as a digital media technology. Covering the technological, social, cultural, and policy dynamics of apps, Goggin ultimately considers what a post-app world might look like. He argues that apps represent a pivowtal moment in the development of digital media, acting as a hinge between the visions and realities of the “mobile,” “cyber,” and “online” societies envisaged since the late 1980s and the imaginaries and materialities of the digital societies that emerged from 2010. Apps offer frames, construct tools, and constitute “small worlds” for users to reorient themselves in digital media settings.
This fascinating book will reframe the conversation about the software that underwrites our digital worlds. It is essential reading for students and scholars of media and communication, as well as for anyone interested in this ubiquitous technology.
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Seitenzahl: 356
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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Table of Contents
Cover
Series Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Abbreviations and Acronyms
Tables
Acknowledgments
1 Introduction
The Apps Pivot in Digital Media and Society
Thinking about Apps
Overview
2 What’s an App?
Anatomy of an App
Histories of Apps
Apps in the Smartphone Moment
Conclusion: “There’s an App for That”
3 App Economy
What Are Apps Worth?
What Are the Most Popular and Profitable Apps?
The Global App Order
The App Store: Ruling the Roost
China’s App Store Exceptionalism
Beyond the App Store: Stand-Alone Apps
Mini apps
Super apps
Conclusion
4 App Media
Game Apps
Locative Media
Realities Media: Virtual, Augmented, (Re)Mixed
Apps and Digital Visualities
Moving Image Media
Sound Media
Message Media
Quotidian Voice Media
Conclusion
5 Social Laboratories of Apps
Health and Well-Being Apps
Apps and Money
Shopping Apps
Dating and Hookup Apps
Conclusion
6 After Apps
What Do We Know about Apps?
Living With/out Apps
Governing and Reimagining Apps
References
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Chapter 3
Table 3.1 Top 10 apps of the 2010s, worldwide, by downloads and spend.
Table 3.2 Top 10 apps worldwide, by downloads, 2015 and 2020.
Table 3.3 Top 10 apps worldwide, by revenue, 2015 and 2020.
Table 3.4 Top 20 digital platform companies by market capitalization, 2020.
Table 3.5 Top 10 Android app stores in China, by monthly average users, 2020.
Chapter 5
Table 5.1 Top 10 grossing dating apps worldwide by overall revenue, 2020.
Table 5.2 Top 9 dating apps in China, 2020.
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Series Title
Digital Media and Society Series
Nancy Baym,
Personal Connections in the Digital Age
2nd edition
Taina Bucher,
Mercedes Bunz and Graham Meikle,
The Internet of Things
Jean Burgess and Joshua Green,
YouTube
2nd edition
Mark Deuze,
Media Work
Andrew Dubber,
Radio in the Digital Age
Quinn DuPont,
Cryptocurrencies and Blockchains
Charles Ess,
Digital Media Ethics
, 3rd edition
Jordan Frith,
Smartphones as Locative Media
Gerard Goggin,
Apps: From Mobile Phones to Digital Lives
Alexander Halavais,
Search Engine Society
, 2nd edition
Martin Hand,
Ubiquitous Photography
Robert Hassan,
The Information Society
Tim Jordan,
Hacking
Graeme Kirkpatrick,
Computer Games and the Social Imaginary
Tama Leaver, Tim Highfield and Crystal Abidin,
Leah A. Lievrouw,
Alternative and Activist New Media
Rich Ling and Jonathan Donner,
Mobile Communication
Donald Matheson and Stuart Allan,
Digital War Reporting
Dhiraj Murthy,
2nd edition
Zizi A. Papacharissi,
A Private Sphere: Democracy in a Digital Age
Julian Thomas, Rowan Wilken and Ellie Rennie,
Wi-Fi
Jill Walker Rettberg,
Blogging
2nd edition
Patrik Wikström,
The Music Industry
3rd edition
Apps
From Mobile Phones to Digital Lives
gerard goggin
polity
Copyright Page
Copyright © Gerard Goggin 2021
The right of Gerard Goggin to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2021 by Polity Press
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
101 Station Landing
Suite 300
Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3848-5
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3849-2 (pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Goggin, Gerard, 1964- author.
Title: Apps : from mobile phones to digital lives / Gerard Goggin.
Description: Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA, USA : Polity, 2021. | Series: Digital media and society series | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “A trailblazing study of one of the most ubiquitous modern technologies”-- Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020054803 (print) | LCCN 2020054804 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509538485 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509538492 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509538508 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Mobile computing--Social aspects. | Application software--Social aspects. | Smartphones--Social aspects. | Digital media.
Classification: LCC HM851 .G6448 2021 (print) | LCC HM851 (ebook) | DDC 302.23/1--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020054803
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020054804
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
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Abbreviations and Acronyms
1G
first-generation mobile network standard
2G
second-generation mobile network standard
3G
third-generation mobile network standard
4G
fourth-generation mobile network standard
5G
fifth-generation mobile network standard
AI
artificial intelligence
API
application programming interface
AR
augmented reality
ARC
Australian Research Council
BBS
bulletin board system
BoP
bottom of the pyramid
BRICS
Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa
CDMA
code division multiple access
CEO
chief executive officer
CMOS
complementary metal oxide semiconductor
CPU
central processing unit
customer ID
customer identification number
dapps
distributed apps
DAU
daily active users
DVC
deputy vice-chancellor
EU
European Union
FCC
Federal Communications Commission
GPS
global positioning system
GSM
global system for mobile communications
HCI
human–computer interaction
HP
Hewlett-Packard
HTML
hypertext markup language
HUD
head-up display
IAMCR
International Association of Media Communications Research
ICT
information and communications technologies
IM
instant messaging
I-mode
Internet mode is a microbrowser technology that supports text, graphics, audio, and video for Web access
iOS
operating system for Apple mobile devices (originally iPhone operating system)
IoT
Internet of Things
IP
Internet protocol
IRC
Internet relay chat
ISDN
integrated services digital network
ITU
International Telecommunications Union
KaiOS
mobile operating system based on Linux
LED
light-emitting diode
LMIC
low- to middle-income countries
MMS
module management system
NFC
near field communication
NTT
Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation
OCR
optical character recognition
OED
Oxford English Dictionary
OS
computer operating system
OTT
over-the-top
PDA
portable digital assistants
PPI
Progressive Policy Institute
QR code
quick response code
RFID
radio frequency identification
RL
real life
SDK
software developer kit
SME
social media entertainment
SMS
short message service
SoC
system-on-a-chip application processor
STS
science and technology studies
SSEAC
Sydney Southeast Asia Centre
UX
user experience
VPN
virtual private network
VR
virtual reality
WAP
wireless application protocol
WiFi
wireless fidelity
WML
wireless markup language
Tables
3.1 Top 10 apps of the 2010s, worldwide, by downloads and spend
3.2 Top 10 apps worldwide, by downloads, 2015 and 2020
3.3 Top 10 apps worldwide, by revenue, 2015 and 2020
3.4 Top 20 digital platform companies by market capitalization, 2020
3.5 Top 10 Android app stores in China, by monthly average users, 2020
5.1 Top 10 grossing dating apps worldwide by overall revenue, 2020
5.2 Top 9 dating apps in China, 2020
Acknowledgments
In this book I bring together ideas that I have garnered and mused upon since at least 2007–2008. That was the time when the smartphone took off, and subsequently apps have proliferated, spread, and become implacably installed at the center of contemporary digital infrastructures, which in turn now underpin many societies globally.
I am grateful for the rich body of work on mobile communication and media and for many conversations, exchanges, and critiques I have been fortunate to have from friends and colleagues in this field, which has come into existence in the early 00s. This book functions as the third volume in a series and takes up many of the concepts, technologies, and ideas I explored in Cell Phone Culture in 2006 and Global Mobile Media in 2011.
My thanks to Cherry Baylosis, Xu Wei Wei (apps in China), and Punit Jagasia (apps in India) for their research assistance. I am especially grateful to Rosemary Curtis for her peerless research advice and for the preparation and proofing of the manuscript.
I would like to acknowledge the support of the University of Sydney, especially through a Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and DVC Research Compact Funding award for the project titled “Emerging Social Technology.” Earlier funding from the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre (SSEAC) for the research workshop “Social and Mobile Media in Southeast Asia” (co-convened with Lim Sun Sun) proved germinal, and I am grateful to its director, Professor Michele Ford, for this award.
The book was written after I took up a position at the superb Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. In a practical and government-of-the-self sense, the COVID-19 circuit breaker left me no option but to finish the book. The angle afforded by Singapore, an entrepôt and a global crossroads, has proved enormously helpful. My thanks to various colleagues, especially Rich Ling, and to the thoughtful and engaged students in my courses, “Global Media Issues and Policy” and “Digital Media Governance,” for many informative conversations.
It has been a pleasure to publish my first book with Polity. Sincere thanks to Mary Savigar for giving me the idea in the first place, for inviting me to consider it, for providing feedback, and for commissioning the project. I owe Ellen McDonald-Kramer a special debt of gratitude for her unstinting support and thoughtful advice through the process. Thanks to the reviewers for their helpful feedback.
Finally, thanks to my family, Bianca, Liam, and Jacqui, for their love, support, and interest especially during the close-quarter circuit breaker period of the COVID pandemic.
Gerard Goggin
Wee Kim Wee School of Information and Communication
Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
March 2021
chapter oneIntroduction
On Saturday, June 20, 2020, US President Donald Trump was looking forward to a campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which he had been widely publicizing via his Twitter account. Only a disappointing 6,200 supporters turned up, leaving many empty seats conspicuously vacant in a stadium with a capacity of 19,000. The shortfall was credited to a prank by TikTok users and K-pop fans, who apparently booked half a million tickets for the rally, causing rally organizers to wildly overestimate attendance (Andrews, 2020). While the exact nature of this digital activism success is tricky to pin down (Madison & Klang, 2020), there’s no doubt that this was an important moment of worldwide recognition of the influence of an app.
From mundane, everyday videos of teens idling and improvising, TikTok quickly established itself as major force in popular culture, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, gaining a reputation for its signature abbreviated, hilarious, and whip-smart videos. Like YouTube before it, TikTok gained a following across many countries. Rajiv Rao, contributor to the Indian tech blog ZDNet, sung its praises: “TikTok introduced India to everyday stars from small towns and villages, and across genders, classes, and castes” (Rao, 2020). TikTok’s vibrant base of users provided a platform to social activism, a high-water mark being the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag, which exceeded 12 billion views in mid-2020, before the prank on Trump’s Tulsa event. Along the way, TikTok has been embroiled in considerable debate on its conservative and narrow norms of gender, race, class, and money—and hence on its contradictory role in reproducing and potentially supporting challenges to inequality and injustice (Kennedy, 2020).
Yet this flowering of cultural activity threatened to come juddering to a halt with India’s June 2020 ban on TikTok and on 58 other Chinese apps over data security concerns. Hot on the heels was Trump, with his August 2020 executive orders that blocked TikTok and WeChat from US app stores and processed transactions of US citizens, then required TikTok to be sold to US interest (or face a ban).
The spectacular career of TikTok shows us only one facet of the omnipresent media and of the cultural phenomenon that is apps. Many people around the world use apps in a myriad of ways—to go to sleep, wake up, plan and manage their daily routines and unexpected events, track and guide their bodies, engage in relationships, or negotiate food, work, health, finances, pleasures, aversions, annoyances, and many other aspects of personal, public, and social life. During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020–2021, apps have come even more to the fore, especially as a technology of choice, expectation, or—as with infectious disease—contact, tracking, and tracing and as a legal requirement and instrument of population and health surveillance and control.
The central argument of the book is that apps represent a pivotal sociotechnical development in a key phase of digital media development. You can see apps as the hinge between two stages of recent media and communication. On the one hand, there are the visions and realities of the mobile, cyber, and online societies, which people envisaged from the late 1980s through to the early 00s. On the other hand, there are the imaginaries and materialities of pervasive media and immersive digital societies, which emerged internationally in the 2010s and onwards, in all their different forms and inequalities.
Apps bring together mobile phones and the Internet; software, computational, data, and hardware developments; web technologies, including the mobile web and what was briefly called Web 2.0; locative technologies; wearable devices; and connected cars, homes, and other environments. Great numbers of users access social media via mobile apps; but the two things are different. Apps provide bridges across the messy ecologies of media, technology, environments, and bodies. Yet apps also represent a litmus test for the shortcomings, limits, edges, and inequalities of digital media’s diffusion and social functions. While apps can ease users’ way into digital cultures, they also often fail or fall short; added to which, apps are often unavailable or too expensive. The apps system can be wasteful and amplify the environmental problems of smartphones and other digital technology. And apps can exacerbate digital exclusion and inequality just as much as they extend access and social participation.
As a guide to understanding the teeming and complex area of apps, the book is pitched at readers who would like a better understanding of apps as part of media, communication, culture, and society. It is aimed at university students of all levels, on programs from undergraduate through masters to doctoral. The book also provides a theoretically informed state-of-the-art account for researchers who study apps across a range of disciplines and fields. In the process, it seeks to lay out and discuss the pivotal role of apps in various contests over social futures in the emerging next-generation Internet, mobile technologies, the Internet of Things, AI and machine learning, automated technologies, platforms, and data cultures and infrastructures.
The Apps Pivot in Digital Media and Society
To make sense of the heady career of apps, I advance five key arguments in the chapters that follow.
First, as elaborated in chapter 2, I discuss the fundamental identity of apps as a kind of software. Like all software, apps have a relationship—and are in dialogue—with the hardware that their code operates as well as with the environments in which both the software and the hardware are situated. While apps have enormous variety and flexibility, they also operate within distinct constraints. Within these limits, apps offer an important bridging of digital media and society: they provide fabric for the sociotechnical systems and infrastructures that characterize many digital societies, as these have taken shape in recent years and are evolving toward the future.
Second, apps are often excitedly promoted as paving the way for wonderful kinds of innovation, woven together with new kinds of economics business models, which typically involve the catchall notion of entrepreneurship. Yet such apparently limitless potential is clearly offset by the fact that apps exist within systems of value, power, and control. At various levels, especially at the level of their construction, design, and affordances, apps constrain their users just as much as they enable them, if not more. Apps often channel their users, uses, and meanings into distinct social relations, economies, and politics. This is the argument I make in chapters 3 and 4, which trace the political and cultural economy of apps, their implication in geopolitical shifts, and the creation of new infrastructures and forms.
Third, in an extraordinarily creative way, apps are pivotal to a teeming field of media innovations; this is something I discuss in chapter 4. App media build on many of the aspects of computers, software, and code applications before the smartphone era. Since the early 00s at least, and indeed well before the turn of the century, apps as media have supported, framed, and mediated our contemporary developments centered on data, algorithms, machine learning, and AI. Taking a wider view still, it is remarkable how apps have been crystallized and have driven innovations across a very wide range of media. In part, these app media innovations have to do with interactions and development in social life and technology that center on the rise of various digital media forms—games, video sharing and streaming, camera, images, visuals, text, language, messages, sound, audio, music, voice, and so on. A reflex focus of many actors in these process as well as of commentators has often been on the app itself: its design, development, marketing, user acceptance, and viability. However, the app is often just the tip of the iceberg. The app helps create a new media form, but it does so as a portal, entry point, or strategic node in a larger system and assemblage.
Fourth, for better or worse, apps function as social laboratories; this is the subject of chapter 5. Apps are fabrics that help media stretch into new shapes, and they also expand our ideas of what functions media can perform. The myriad media of apps infiltrate everyday life in new ways. All around the world, apps have been seized or used to make do as resources for projects of social change. They can be pivotal in infrastructures that underpin political, social, and cultural change. The social laboratories of apps operate at a huge range of scales, which run from the small worlds of our ordinary lives through the meso levels of organizations, institutions, subcultures, communities, and publics to the macro levels of national, regional, and global settings.
Fifth, because of characteristics of apps outlined in these four arguments, we need to talk about apps and take their functions, implications, and potentials seriously, yet skeptically. There have been many anxieties raised by apps and their deleterious impacts on work–life balance, mental health, relationships and intimacies, misinformation and fake news, hate speech, extreme content, bias, discrimination, and inequalities, not to mention the future of cultural diversity, or accessible and affordable media. However, apps have been hard to pin down. They seem to be everywhere—“there’s an app for that”—and yet they are kinda boring—just part of the digital and social furniture. Issues of values, politics, and policy associated with apps early on—such as the enclosure and control represented by the advent of app stores, the role of apps in the creeping commodification of culture and media, and then across swathes of social life—were slippery and hard to pin down.
Apps debates have changed dramatically in recent years. One obvious area of concern is the extension of data into many areas of human, built, and natural environments. Datafication has been widely discussed and critiqued. Apps are not just a bit player in the politics of data infrastructures, algorithms, and AI, as we can now see vividly from the wide and deep global and local issues raised by the entrenchment of what has been called “digital platforms.” We don’t have a clear sense so far of where apps fit into this global landscape, where media and communications offer enormous scope for advancing social progress, equality, justice, rights, and other important values and goals, yet the countervailing realities and future scenarios appear very bleak. By way of concluding the book, I look at the role of apps in the grand social project of putting media and communications firmly back in people’s hands.
Thinking about Apps
In thinking about apps, we can start with work that focuses on the topic. The first dedicated book on apps was Paul D. Miller and Svitlana Matviyenko’s 2014 multicontributor volume The Imaginary App (Miller & Matviyenko, 2014). Matviyenko was the lead editor of another landmark anthology of studies on apps, a 2015 special issue of the journal Fibreculture titled Apps and Affect (Matviyenko et al., 2015). This volume raised questions about the intense relationships that apps have with our bodies and on how we feel, perceive, and know things. The next milestone in app research was Jeremy Wade Morris and Sarah Murray’s 2018 multicontributor volume Appified, which looked at the ways in which apps fit into and shape contemporary media and culture in general: “[A]pps represent not just a fashionable tech trend but a new way of accessing information, experiencing media, mediating commerce, and understanding the self and others” (Morris & Murray, 2018, p. 19). The fourth milestone is an ambitious effort to create methods for app studies; it comes from various researchers gathered under the banner of the App Studies Initiative who give us the following message:
Apps are designed to perform as concrete software objects but are continually transformed … the notion of apps as entirely self-contained also belies their involvement in the data flows of multi-sided platforms and their necessary entanglement with varying hardware devices and digital infrastructures that make their operations at once possible and, indeed, valuable. (Dieter et al., 2019, p. 2)
In addition to these four landmarks in app studies, extensive research on apps has been carried out and distributed across the reaches of many disciplines and fields, much of which I have consulted and drawn upon in the following chapters (insofar as space permitted).
It can be helpful to approach apps as a relatively recent development in the broader field of mobile communications and media. Scholars have theorized mobile communications and media as a new phase of communication technology and society (Katz & Aakhus, 2002; Ling, 2012). A range of cultural and media researchers have been especially interested in the way in which mobile communication unfolds, takes shape, and is imagined, used, and adapted in social and cultural contexts. Drawing on a wide range of traditions, and especially on cultural studies, researchers have contributed a rich body of work on the cultural dimensions of mobile media (Goggin, 2008). They have sought to understand the intensity and the reach of mobile media across social and individual life. There has been a symbiosis between smartphones and apps in their mass diffusion phase: “[S]martphones have changed the way we communicate … smartphones are structured into the very way that we coordinate society … The ‘appification’ of mobile communication is one of the key transitions in the development of the smartphone” (Rich et al., 2020, pp. 3, 9; see also Jin, 2017).
While apps have taken shape via other digital technologies such as smartphones, at the most fundamental level they are a form of software. They are constituted via programming and coding, which have materialities that shape the design, implementations, and effects of apps, as the case of news shows us (Weber & Kosterich, 2018). Since the emergence of software studies, theories and research around software have moved beyond grappling with the complexity of software and attempted especially to pinpoint its pivotal and catalytic role in the creation of digital media.
Apps have reshaped the Internet and how we experience it—especially because their emergence coincides with the rise of social media. Many of the most popular apps are social media apps such as the popular Facebook, Twitter, Weibo, or Instagram services. Social media apps foster what José van Dijck has called a “culture of connectivity” (van Dijck, 2013). They also make it hard for us to disconnect from digital networks (Hesselberth, 2018). Many social media services started as Internet services or as pre-smartphone mobile services. This includes Facebook, which many users experience and think of as a mobile app, not as an Internet-based software for a desktop or laptop computer. With mobile media, especially smartphones, come the kinds of affordances that offer different inventions and appropriations of social media, notably portability, availability, locatability, and multimediality, as Andrew Schrock argues (Schrock, 2015). The mix of connectivity and affordances is taken in new directions by messaging apps such as Line, WeChat, and WhatsApp, to mention but a few.
From the trajectory of apps, we can also return to fundamental questions of media and communication. What kind of medium is an app? And what kind of communication does it enact or support? Apps are also a barometer and conduit for emerging directions in media of various sorts—such as sensory, haptic, audio, and sound media, as well as other kinds, less well recognized in high modernist media studies. Apps spurred new ways of thinking about media and media objects, for instance post-phenomenological approaches (Ash, 2018).
If nothing else, the rise of apps has been underpinned by an extraordinary growth in data and by the increasing role that smartphones and apps play in the new data infrastructures, economy, ecologies, and cultures. So here we find a range of critical work on data helpful for understanding apps. This work encompasses the part they play in surveillance (Thurman, 2018); the concept of data colonialism, including the compulsory nature of data enlistment, and the stakes in disconnection (Couldry & Mejias, 2019); the sociology of data selves and identities (Lupton, 2016, 2020); data sharing and social practices (Grundy et al., 2019); the leaky nature of data and the fragmented contexts of apps (Wilmott, 2016).
Apps have been significantly transformed and reconfigured by the rise of algorithms, AI, machine learning, and automation and by users’ iterative interactions with these technologies. Apps themselves are shaped by algorithms: the ranking of apps by app stores, or the co-construction of social categories and relationships such as “friendship” or intimacy, are cases in point (see Chambers, 2017; Wang, 2020a). As for automation, it turns out that many apps, despite their intentions and design, are surprisingly unautomated—hence the ongoing issue of the relationship between human actions and automation has a strong purchase in relation to apps as well (Gervasio, 2019). Thus apps play an important role in understanding the nature and place of algorithms in contemporary media (Galloway, 2006; Gillespie, 2014; Neyland, 2019; Striphas, 2015) and in the conduct and governance of culture and of everyday life (Latzer & Festic, 2019). Scholars in critical algorithm studies have pointed to a range of problems caused by the growing dependence on, and indeed design premised upon, algorithms and apps. This aspect is captured in Sara Wachter-Boettcher’s 2017 book Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech (Wachter-Boettcher, 2017). Various scholars have investigated the role of apps in reinforcing social inequalities and injustice, including those related to race (Benjamin, 2019; Poster, 2019).
A stumbling block here is the way in which apps are used, at least in much public discourse, to frame a familiar, welcoming user perspective on emerging technology developments. Also challenging is the way in which apps are conjoined with algorithms in promises of brighter, seductive social futures, and also in their dystopian, dark sides. An excellent example of this can be seen in imaginaries and in plans for future smart cities (Green, 2019), or in the area of digital government and service delivery—what Paul Henman dubs “digital social policy” (Henman, 2019).
An important shift in the nature of apps has occurred with the arrival of “digital platforms.” Now in their ascendancy, digital platforms represent a new phase for apps. They have their origins in the different computer operating systems and software of the 1980s and 1990s, such as Windows and Apple. Games platforms also appeared; they represent another kind of “platform wars”—for instance, rivalries between Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft and, later, between streaming providers such as Twitch (Taylor, 2018), Facebook Gaming, and YouTube Gaming. Games had a formative role in the invention of creative and computational aspects of digital platforms (Andreessen, 2007; Bogost & Monfort 2009).
Platforms are significant because they integrate various things that make them compelling for their users. While digital platforms take different forms, commonly they are corporately or privately owned infrastructure, enclosed or semi-closed systems, and offer new ways to connect the various sides of markets—consumers, 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 twoWhat’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 to run on a mobile phone or tablet computer. (OED, 2020)
The OED registers the earliest instances of the word “app” and its plural “apps”; these occurred in Computerworld magazine in the early 1980s. “Killer app” is a term recorded as appearing in the late 1980s. It was short for “killer application,” meaning something indispensable or without a rival (OED). As software and computing historian Martin Campbell-Kelly explains, “[t]he ‘killer app’ hypothesis argues that a novel application, by enabling an activity that was previously impossible or too expensive, causes a new technology to become widely adopted” (Campbell-Kelly, 2003, p. 212). The moniker “killer app” was applied for instance to VisiCalc. VisiCalc was an application launched in 1979 that brought the spreadsheet to personal computing, paving the way for the PC to be taken seriously as a business tool (pp. 212–214). For some time, “apps” designated a diverse range of software applications for desktop or enterprises computers, handhelds (such as the Palm), Internet and web apps, and then, increasingly, mobile phones. For instance, applications for the mobile Internet wireless access protocol (WAP) were sometimes referred to as “WAP apps.” At this stage, though, “mobile apps” could still refer mostly to applications and design solutions for mobile hardware and devices—not necessarily just to software.
This changes from roughly 2001 onwards. That year saw an increase in the frequency of references to mobile apps and handheld apps—or, in the US context, wireless apps—across a range of news and journalism outlets, especially in the trade and business press. This is not surprising, given the industry’s growing focus on mobile applications development and the efforts to develop more content and services for emerging 2G and 3G mobile services. At the premier mobile industry event 3GSM World Congress in 2003 there were announcements of new commercial ventures designed to expand mobile app development and distribution. At this juncture, vendors were still seeking to link up mobile devices with software applications and data running on enterprise networks and services—the Canadian company Blackberry, for instance, was reported as aiming to “mobilise apps” (Moore, 2004).
As we shall see, apps really became a household word from 2008 onwards. To understand how this app moment came about, we’ll shortly have a look at some of the kinds of technologies, social developments, and media cultures that created the conditions for apps to become a household word. In the meanwhile, let’s see how apps work as a technology.
