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I kinda wonder if this is an age thing as the English language morphs over time.

I'm a bit old school, I like the XDG standard, but the arguments against "~/Library/Application Support" don't make sense to me.

The people arguing against it are saying that a program that uses the CLI is not an "App". That argument seems wrong. App is short for "application" and I've been using the long form of that term since before the GUI even existed. A command line application is still an App in my mind.

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It looks like Finder only treats files with an .app extension as "App Bundles" by showing an icon for them. But Apple seems to be careful with their language around macOS and (usually) calls these either "App Bundles" or "Bundles" and not "Apps" or "Applications". That's not always the case though. Here are some quotes from their docs:

> A bundle is a directory with a standardized hierarchical structure that holds executable code and the resources used by that code.

> In this document the term app refers to a main executable packaged in a bundle structure. This encompasses apps, app extensions, App Clips, system extensions...

It's even in the name: a command line application. The disconnect comes from Apple adopting the term "app" when they launched the App Store in 2008. And the aggressive marketing campaign with phrases like "there's an app for that". The word changed (in some minds) from meaning "any executable" to one that is on a phone.

Before they rebased onto UNIX, Mac files had two parts: a data fork and a resource fork. Data had the binary. Resource had strings, images, and other assets that the binary needed.

It was great for local portability: you could put the file wherever you wanted, and it would still be colocated with its stuff. It was bad for network portability, because a lot of transport layers didn't respect the forks.

So Apple migrated to bundles - magic folders that look like a single file in the Finder, but contain all the resources it might need.

On the 68K Mac applications, the executable code was also a resource ('CODE'). When they switched to PPC, PPC code went into the data fork.