What is application software and examples?

application systems

One of the first things to understand about the term “application software” is that it is exceedingly broad.

Application software is commonly defined as any program or number of programs designed for end-users. That’s it, in a nutshell.

In that sense, any end user program can be called an “application.” Hence the age-old saying: “there's an app for that.”

People often use the term “application software” to talk about bundles or groups of individual software applications, using a different term, “application program,” to refer to individual applications.

That’s because the word “program” correlates to a discrete, countable single unit, while the word “software” is often used to refer to more than one individual program.

Examples of application software include items like Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, or any of the web browsers used navigate the Internet … or the actual software suites themselves, if they are intended for end users.

Another way to understand application software is to contrast it with other software. In a very basic sense, every program that you use on your computer is a piece of application software.

The operating system, on the other hand, is system software. Historically, the application was generally born as computers evolved into systems where you could run a particular codebase on a given operating system.