Ask five people what makes something a 'web app' and you will, reliably, get five different answers. One person points at Gmail. Another points at Figma. A third insists nothing is a real web app unless it works offline and ships with a service worker. By the time the fourth person opens their mouth, someone has already started arguing about whether a static site with a contact form counts.
The phrase has been around since roughly 1999 — the earliest uses we could trace cluster around Salesforce's pitch to enterprise buyers — and in the twenty-seven years since, it has been stretched in every direction the marketing department could imagine. That makes it nearly useless as a technical term and weirdly important as a cultural one. People know what they mean when they say 'web app,' even if they can't write a definition that doesn't immediately leak.
We spend our days at dotstore arguing about whether something belongs in the catalog, so we have a working definition. It is not a clean one. But it is the one we use.
The old line: pages vs. programs
For most of the 2000s, the simple test was: does the page reload when you click things? If yes, it was a website. If no, it was a web app. Gmail was the textbook example. Open the inbox, click a message, watch the message panel update without the URL bar flickering. The page was behaving like a desktop program that happened to live in a browser tab.
That test stopped working around 2014, when Single Page Applications quietly ate the web. Suddenly every marketing site, every news homepage, every restaurant ordering page was a SPA. The 'no reload' rule started classifying menu pages at fast-casual chains as applications. Something was off.
What we actually mean now
The more honest definition — the one most people use without thinking — is something like: an interactive software product that delivers ongoing utility through a browser. The keyword is ongoing. A web app is something you come back to. A website is something you visit.
Notion is an app. The New York Times is a website. Linear is an app. Wikipedia is a website (which is interesting, because the editing surface for logged-in contributors is pretty obviously an app — Wikipedia is both, depending on what you are doing).
Four properties that almost always apply
When we are deciding whether something belongs in the catalog, we look at four things. None of them is strictly required, but a candidate usually has at least three.
- 1Persistent state. Your data sticks around between sessions. A todo list that forgets your todos every time you close the tab is not a web app — it is a demo.
- 2An authenticated identity. You sign in. The product knows who you are. Even if accounts are optional, they exist as a first-class concept.
- 3A primary purpose other than reading. You are doing something — editing, building, communicating, calculating. Consuming content is fine as a side effect, but it is not why you opened the tab.
- 4Frequent or sustained use. You will come back. Maybe daily, maybe weekly, but not once. A wedding registry is a website. A budgeting tool is a web app.
Where the definition keeps slipping
The frustrating part is that all four of those properties have started showing up in things nobody would call an app. Substack publications have authenticated identities and persistent state. Reddit threads are interactive and people come back daily. A modern Shopify storefront has more JavaScript than the first version of Photoshop. The categorical boundary is not technical anymore — it is about intent.
Browsers themselves have also blurred the line. Chrome, Edge, and Safari now let you install any sufficiently capable site as a standalone application, with its own dock icon, its own window, and its own permissions. Once installed, a Progressive Web App is functionally indistinguishable from a native one to most people. They just know it lives in a window without a tab strip.
"The browser used to be a place you visited the internet from. Now it is the internet's operating system."
Why the distinction still matters
If web apps and websites are blurring, why bother distinguishing them at all? Because the things you should look for are different.
When you evaluate a website, you care about whether it loads quickly, whether the content is good, and whether it works on your phone. When you evaluate a web app, you care about whether it will be there in two years, whether your data is portable, whether the company can keep the lights on, and whether the keyboard shortcuts respect your operating system. The questions are different because the stakes are different. A bad website wastes thirty seconds of your time. A bad web app, two years in, can take your whole workflow with it when it shuts down.
This is why our reviews look the way they do. We do not score 'aesthetics' the way a design publication might. We score things like 'will my data still open in something else if this team gets acquired?' That is an app question. A website doesn't owe you that.
A short field guide
If you are trying to decide whether to file something under 'app' or 'site' in your own head, this rough triage usually works:
- If you would feel bad about losing it tomorrow, it is an app.
- If the URL bar shows the same address whether you are doing two different things, it is probably an app.
- If you have a keyboard shortcut for it pinned to muscle memory, it is definitely an app.
- If you have only ever opened it from a Google result, it is almost certainly a website.
Where we draw the line
For the catalog, we accept anything that you would reasonably 'open' the way you open a desktop program — anything you sign into, leave open, and return to. We have rejected some excellent reading experiences because they fail the 'open vs. visit' test. We have also accepted a few unusual entries — calculator-style utilities that don't require accounts but earn their place by being the kind of tool you bookmark and reach for repeatedly.
We will keep adjusting. The phrase 'web app' has been moving for a quarter-century. The only honest position is that the definition is a snapshot, not a fixed point. This is ours for 2026.
If you came here looking for a list of recommended apps that fit the definition above, the front page of dotstore is a fine place to start. The featured row is our editors' best guess at what deserves a tab in your browser this week.
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