Got a comment I've been waiting for for a long time:

I don't think we called programs "apps" back in the day

I know it feels that way. It really does. But it's not true; the word is ancient.

In print, you can find it in various magazines going back to 86 here and there. Since it's a pretty obvious abbreviation for the fairly lengthy word 'application' it got independently invented many times. But in '89 Dvorak (seemingly) coined "killer app," and pretty much overnight it became a common term in publications, PC Mag uses it heavily throughout the early 90s.

Among nerds however it seems to go back much further; I tried a Google Groups search for "before:1989/01/01 "apps" " (apps in quotes) and found, for instance, one Scott Miller opining in November 1984 that "Some [UNIX] apps will in fact port just by recompiling." There are tons of other hits from the mid to late 80s; this was absolutely A Thing. And why wouldn't it be? Do you want to spell out Applications over and over and over? Abbreviations are a universal element of natural language.

I think the reason that it feels like a neologism is because prior to the smartphone explosion, most people simply didn't talk or think about computer software. Those who did were nerds, and we used a mix of terms: "applications", "programs", "apps", "software." Up through the 2000s however most end users thought of everything their PC could do as inherent functionality, and didn't really distinguish between the computer, the OS, and the programs running within it, so they had little reason to use any of these terms.

Smartphones made the practice of installing new software on a device a vastly more common experience for the everyday user, and at the same time they taught everyone that the only name for these things was "apps." It's not a new word by any means, but a lot more people are using it now, and it's the only term they use because they've never heard any of the others. As a result it feels like it came out of nowhere, and (probably more importantly) for nerds like us who think of themselves as old heads, it's very easy to knee-jerk-associate it with The Unwashed Masses.

"oh, that's the term that Lusers use, they don't know it's called a Program."

I've been playing a lot of Wii U and 3DS again recently, and it's shocking just how much more enjoyable of an experience it is to just use their respective operating systems and associated features. I understand the reason that the Switch's OS is blander than dry toast is to avoid the glacial load times of the Wii U and 3DS' OSs, but good lord does it get boring after a while.

It feels like we lost a lot in that trade: Miiverse (Though this was probably cut more to avoid paying moderation costs), decorations like badges and themes, Streetpass & Play Coins, Miis, the WaraWara Plaza - all things intended to make these systems more enjoyable to use beyond just being a box for games. There's more than just menu design to making a good user experience, after all. The closest thing the Switch has to interesting anymore is motion control and a touch screen, the latter of which remains basically unused aside from system menus.

Here's hoping that the Switch 2 has enough processing/memory headroom to give the OS some personality and fun again.

I made a website. It's called One Million Checkboxes Dot Com. It has one million checkboxes on it.

Checking a box checks it for everyone.

That's it! Have fun.