App

App

Roger Matthews, Memorial University of Newfoundland

Definitions and background

The word app, the accepted abbreviation for the term application, refers to a computer application that is smaller in size which can be quickly downloaded and installed on mobile devices without having to be rebooted (Cherner & Lee, 2014). According to Cherner & Lee (2014) the current leaders in providing apps for individual use are the App Store by Apple and Google Play (formerly the Android Market) for Android both of which were founded in 2008. These services, as of October 2013, offer over six hundred thousand free apps and nearly four hundred thousand paid apps for download (Cherner & Lee, 2014). There are many ways of categorizing apps across services and sites and categories can range from general functionality, free vs paid, specific populations, specific devices, specific purposes and many more (Douglas et al., 2012). As of January 2013 the category ‘education’ represented the second most number of total app downloads thus far (Kucirkova et al., 2014). Cheong et al. (2012) observed that with the wide scale availability of mobile devices today; they are an “obvious choice of technology with which to engage students” (p. 98).