A vertical application typically serves a specific industry or departmental need, such as a medical billing system. Software companies and individual developers typically make open source applications freely available under a generic or public license, such as GNU.Ī developer or team of developers can create an application for a specific vertical market. Open source applications, such as WordPress, provide the source code for end users and developers to use and modify. They cannot modify these applications they can only add functionality to them via third-party add-ons.

End users can buy or license proprietary applications through the vendor providing the software. Proprietary software programs, such as Adobe Photoshop, are applications that are owned under copyright. Application licensingĪpplications can also be grouped into categories by licensing style. Additionally, developers often code mobile applications to work on a specific device platform. Hybrid applications have APIs that can access device resources, similar to a native application, but are typically written in languages such as HTML and CSS. A developer can write web applications in several languages, including JavaScript, CSS and HTML, but they cannot access the hardware on which the application is installed. For example, the Photos application on Mac OS X is written in Objective-C, which is the same language that Mac OS X uses.Īn end user typically accesses a web application via a web browser, such as Google Chrome. The developer codes a native application to run on specific hardware, such as a camera or GPS, and in the same programming language as the underlying OS. Applications can vary in many ways, including how they're built, what platform they run on, whether they are open source or proprietary, or for which market they are used.įor example, a mobile application developer writes their code as a native, web or hybrid application - and these terms can also describe desktop applications.

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