Apps are more similar to websites than to traditional desktop applications.

Apps, like websites, are segregated by origin and sandboxed.

Although apps have a richer set of high-fidelity APIs.

Traditional desktop applications, on the other hand, can read and write to the shared filesystem.

This allows them to coordinate with other applications.

But it also means you have to trust them more, because they could harm you more.

It's no accident that most productive work today is still done on desktops, which by default don't have the same origin cage.

It's kind of funny that "app" and "application" sound similar but have wildly different emergent properties!