If you were thinking that this mobile application thing is just a fad, you may want to reconsider as the American Dialect Society has just named “app” the word of the year for 2010.
“App has been around for ages, but with millions of dollars of marketing muscle behind the slogan ‘There’s an app for that,’ plus the arrival of ‘app stores’ for a wide spectrum of operating systems for phones and computers, app really exploded in the last 12 months,” Ben Zimmer, American Dialect Society char, said in a prepared statement. “One of the most convincing arguments from the voting floor was from a woman who said that even her grandmother had heard of it.”
Obviously, Apple has had a major proponent of the spreading of app awareness in the mainstream with its iPhone and App Store. Many of the programs and capabilities that Apple brought to the table had been available on other smartphones (although, in a less polished manner) but the iPhone really made it resonate with the mass market.
They say a rising tide lifts all ships and we’re starting to see that in the app space. Once a junky, cumbersome mess, the Android Market now has over 200,000 programs and the recent redesign makes it a very pleasant experience. In fact, I prefer tooling around the Android Market on the Tab than I do looking through the App Store on the iPad.
Even the term “App Store” is in the middle of some contentious debate, as Apple is trying to trademark the term but Microsoft isn’t having that. Microsoft believes that it is a generic term, or soon will be, so I’m sure a lot of lawyers will make money trying to hash that one out.
What do you guys think about this becoming the word of the year? Is “application” or “program” really so hard to say?
[Via TUAW]