The app-driven life: How smartphone apps are changing our lives

"There's an app for that" is more than just Apple's marketing mantra. Apps have become an American lifestyle.

"I'm using my phone when I'm sleeping," says Amanda Soloway. Every night, Ms. Soloway turns on an iPhone application called Sleep Cycle and tucks her smart phone into bed with her. The app monitors her sleep patterns and wakes her at the optimal moment – within a 30-minute time frame she has selected.

Before she's out from under the covers, she's checking the weather (another rainy day in Seattle) and connecting with her world via Facebook (photos from a dinner last night) and e-mail (some fellow University of Washington students want to push back today's meeting).

RECOMMENDED: 20 best iPhone apps for starters

Once she's out the door, she plugs in her headphones and hunts for good walking music in SoundCloud. The jukebox app pulls up a few tracks from the DJ duo Poolside and streams them over her phone's cellular Internet connection.

As she dashes between classes for her master's in business administration program, Soloway's iPhone calendar app vibrates 10 minutes before important appointments.

She has more than 100 apps on her phone, each serving a different purpose. She deposits checks through the Bank of America app, finds bus schedules through OneBusAway, passes time playing Bejeweled, compiles grocery lists through ZipList, texts with her best friend through WhatsApp, and edits her photos with any of 18 different photography apps.

Soloway actually prefers regular computers. Websites never look quite right shining through a screen the size of a baseball card. Typing e-mails never quite feels right when she taps on the phone's smooth glass surface. But life extends well beyond the reach of her desktop.

"I remember when I got my iPhone," she says. "So many people told me, 'It will change your life.' But I was really hesitant. Now, I don't know if I could go back. My phone is just a lot more convenient."

Millions of Americans now rely on pocket-sized computers to shop, play, read, date, learn, work out, take photos, and find directions. These apps – shorthand for software applications – are the heart and soul of smart phones.

The app-driven life has kick-started a new computer revolution – one that has spread faster and become more intimate than any before.

The world has adopted smart phones and tablets 10 times faster than it embraced personal computers in the 1980s, twice as fast as it logged into the Internet boom of the '90s, and three times faster than it joined social networks in the new millennium, according to the app-tracking firm Flurry.

Svelte, intuitive hardware helps propel the movement, but this new era in consumer electronics really started a year after the debut of the original iPhone. In early 2008, Apple opened the digital doors to its App Store, an online marketplace for programmers around the world to sell their own mobile apps.

While Apple guarded the gates – demanding that each app be submitted for review – it kept a wide berth. Programmers for the iPhone and Google's competing Android line could take advantage of tools unavailable on most personal computers: touch screens, cameras, tilt sensors, compasses, location tracking, cellular Internet connections, and the fact that people carry these devices with them at all times.

Soon, apps emerged for practically every need in a person's day.

Productivity goosed by zombies?

Matthew Ablon uses his Android phone to keep fit. This freshman at Ouachita Baptist University in Arkadelphia, Ark., never liked running in high school. It seemed monotonous. Boring. A single app changed his mind.

This past semester, Mr. Ablon downloaded Zombies, Run! – a workout app that motivates people to run by appealing to their Darwinian desire not to get eaten by zombies. As Ablon runs, this run tracker mixes in elements of an audio adventure game. The app interrupts his normal music playlist with mission instructions – such as news that he's found (virtual) supplies that he can distribute to survivors living in a nearby (fictional) compound. But before he can return home with the provisions, he needs to pick up the pace and outrun the zombie horde.

This $8 app – quite a bit more expensive than the traditional 99-cent threshold for phone apps – is "worth every penny," says Ablon. He now runs two to three miles twice a week with imaginary zombies on his heels.

Is this a peculiar way to encourage good habits? Definitely. But is it effective? The British government thinks so. As the workout app rang up a quarter-million downloads, Britain's National Health Service commissioned the team behind Zombies to design a self-improvement app for the broader public (i.e., without the undead theme). The group plans to reveal this new project in the spring.

As apps worm their way into our daily lives, plenty of smart-phone owners now find the word "phone" becoming an increasingly anachronistic term for these devices. In a TIPP poll commissioned by The Christian Science Monitor, close to half of respondents (46 percent) reported using their smart phones more than 10 times a day for actions other than making a phone call.

"Apps bring out the human part of technology," says Scott Steinberg, a consultant and professional speaker on innovation in St. Louis. Desk-bound PCs were designed for business, he says. They're tools of productivity occasionally co-opted for entertainment. Yet while iPhone and Android owe a lot to BlackBerry (the pinstriped, business-minded older brother of the smart-phone family), apps were predominantly designed for life outside the office.