Everything Is App Now

The tech industry's linguistic laziness has reached peak efficiency. We used to have specific, descriptive terms for different types of software—daemons lurking in the background, compilers doing their thing, batch files automating tasks. Now? Just slap "app" on everything and call it a day.

It's like we collectively decided that nuance was too much work. Your operating system? App. That kernel-level service running critical infrastructure? Also app. The 50-line Python script you wrote to rename files? Believe it or not, app. Marketing teams discovered that "app" sounds friendlier than "daemon" (fair enough, demons aren't great for branding), and now we're stuck in this vocabulary wasteland where everything from Photoshop to systemd gets the same label.

The real tragedy? Try explaining to a junior dev what a daemon actually is when their entire mental model is just "apps all the way down." We've traded precision for simplicity, and honestly, we're not getting it back.