It's been 13 years of "no, you can't do in the phone's webbrowser the thing you can do in a PC's webbrowser, you need to install a fucking app". People just accepted it. The fuckers accepted it.
And it's really not that unreasonable. What the user thinks of as an app could be more than 1 program. It makes sense to put an abstraction between users and programs because lots of sophisticated software use separate programs that the end user doesn't care about, just the whole.
I don't think anyone's saying we should only refer to each individual executable file. Just that 'apps' arbitrarily replaced the word 'program' with absolutely no change in definition to make it sound New and Marketable tm.
The Task Manager in Windows always had an "Applications" tab and a "Processes" tab, going back to Windows 98 at least. "Programs" was always too broad and restricted to being colloquial; the specific word was either application or executable.
What's worth ranting about is whether people have stopped understanding "App" as short for something.
The l33t w4r3z d00dz were calling applications 'appz' since at least the '90s. Then there was that brief period where Apple tried to claim "app store" was short for "apple store" so no one else could say it..