See also the client camera movement guide:

I fought hard against that for years. I still only use 'app' for phone programs, but I stopped correcting people every time they used the term for anything else. It isn't technically wrong, but it grates on my nerves for some reason.

In the Netherlands basically everyone uses whatsapp. In the beginning people would say send me a whatsapp or something like that. But pretty quickly people started to shorten it to just app. So people will say stuff like I just got an app (instead of message), it drives me nuts. Like my family chat group is called "app group".

On the flipside, "Bot" is the backend for almost everything that I've dealt with recently.

"We need the data moved from X to Y, can someone make a bot for that?"

Internal suffering

"... Yes. We can setup an API between X and Y."

"Great! We also want a bot to generate daily reports from Y"

Suffering intensifies

"... Ok."

I don't even try to fight it anymore.

Everything is a file

The other day I realized they did that because its APPle. I have no evidence but I'm sticking with it

The word app has been around forever, first appearing in the 1970s (according to some dictionaries I just googled). Pendulum swung towards “programs” and we have since swung back to the correct term.

And now the kids don't know what a file path is anymore. Legit my wife is a professor, and she gets adeer in the headlight look when she is helping students debug code and she mentions a file path not being right in there code.

Serious response, no joke... what's a file path?

These are sophomores and Juniors in college.

A long time ago I joined a new remote-first company and in my first month they made an event where they brought in all employees from all over the world for a week at a farm hotel for a mix or meetings and leisure activities.

In one specific meeting the CEO was talking app this app that and I was very confused. The product was a server side program that had a web client, an electron app and two native mobile apps. But the CEO was talking about things that didn't make sense for those apps.

At some point I interrupted the meeting and asked for clarification: what are you talking about when you say app? It's not the mobile apps?

The CEO made a funny face and mentioned an engineer. I looked at him and he had a smug face and said something along the lines of "well, go on, explain it". CEO then explained he was talking about the new big project, which was basically an extension system for the server product - and the extensions would be called apps.

That night I found that engineer at the hotel bar and asked more details about it. Turns out he was the team lead on this project and he hated the term "apps" for it and had been very vocal about it before, saying among other things that it would cause confusion with the client apps we have. Most of the company agreed with him at the time but the CEO demanded it be named apps anyway.

These days everyone there thinks that naming it apps was the right call, but I always hated having to refer to them as "server extension app" to avoid any confusion, specially because I often worked on integrations with third party tools and those tools also had their own stuff called apps so instead of just saying something like "the Kabum extension" I had to say "the ChaChin server Kabum app" (as in this example's context there would also be multiple Kabum clients and ChaChin clients that would all be known as apps too)

Web browser? "app". Web page? "app". Dialog box? "app". Phone app that's just a thin shell for the web site? "appapp".

I hate that this meme never explains what application meant 'back then'
I get that it's a problem now, but if it had a clear enough definition back then, maybe this couldn't have occurred the way it did?