Apps Are Media
Apps have taken over the world. If you doubt that just take a look at this app map by Horace Dediu at Asymco which shows the 123 countries in the world where iPhones are available. Of course, anywhere you can get an iPhone, you can get an iPhone app. Like the Web, apps are distributed globally.
Context & Ripple Effects
The 'apps are media' argument lands on top of an arc the corpus has been building for over a year: VentureBeat reported in October 2010 that iPhone apps were out-pulling major TV shows and sports broadcasts as attention magnets, and Flurry argued in August 2011 that mobile app inventory was hungry enough to eat internet display ad spend. What Horace Dediu's Asymco app map adds is the distribution half of the claim — iPhones sold in 123 countries means app reach is global by default, matching the Web without the Web's open publishing layer.
Dediu matters to the framing as well as the data: per the corpus he was ranked the most accurate of dozens of analysts covering Apple as of late 2010, so his map functions as a credibility anchor for treating apps as a media category rather than a software niche. Scobleizer had already asked in November 2010 whether the tech press was still needed when apps take off on their own — this piece extends that question from press to all legacy media.
First-order effects
- Media buyers now face app inventory as a direct competitor to TV and web display placements, since the same audiences Flurry measured are reachable in 123 countries through a single store channel.
- Developers get Web-scale distribution without building Web-scale infrastructure — any app published to the App Store is instantly available everywhere an iPhone is sold.
Second-order effects
- Ad dollars follow the audience shift Flurry flagged, forcing web display networks to price against mobile app inventory rather than treat it as an adjacent market.
- Traditional media measurement built around broadcasts and pageviews comes under pressure to count app engagement, because advertisers cannot allocate budgets across channels they cannot compare.
Third-order effects
- If apps are accepted as media, the app store replaces the broadcaster and the portal as the gatekeeper between content and audience — whoever controls store placement controls global reach, a structural position the open Web never concentrated in one party.
- The category boundary between 'software' and 'media' erodes: every app becomes a channel with its own inventory, pushing the industry toward attention-based measurement regardless of format.
The trend: Consumer attention is migrating from the open Web and broadcast schedules into store-distributed apps, turning app platforms into the dominant media gatekeepers of the smartphone era.