But, more to the point “app” entered the casual lexicon about 15 years when smartphones became ubiquitous.
The term “application” has had a well understood meaning for far longer than that. That’s simply when people started conflating “app” with “mobile app” due to some clever marketing by "App"le.
If you’re speaking to someone and they say “is there a web_site_ I can use, like on a laptop?” and they respond with “yes, there’s an app”
I think that answer would be pretty unambiguous. If you hear that answer after asking that question and your first thought is that they mean “smartphone app”, you could just ask “is it a smartphone app or web app?” But if you had already told them you wanted to access something from a laptop and they tell you there is an “app” then you can normally safely assume that it’s not a mobile app.
isVeryLoud@lemmy.ca 10 months ago
Web developer here.
If your site has a lot of interactivity, it is a web app.
A read-only site like Wikipedia is not a web app.
A store page is not a web app.
Facebook, Lemmy, Reddit, Twitter, etc. are web apps because they provide a lot of interactivity.
I agree that the line between web apps and websites is blurry, but my thinking is if a website is built mostly using front-end technologies, it is a web app, if it’s built mostly with JSP or PHP, it’s a website. Things like the WordPress admin panel blur the line between the two as they offer lots of interactivity, but is mostly PHP-based.
asdfasdfasdf@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Also a web developer. I don’t understand the reason you’d even need a common term to distinguish between the two. Wikipedia and Facebook are websites. Tons of websites have interactivity. It’s a spectrum.
isVeryLoud@lemmy.ca 10 months ago
Correct tbh, it’s all just websites.