Oboy, so Atlassian is renaming Products to Apps now and the Atlassian community is not very happy about it :)

Atlassian Community

Atlassian Administration terminology change from “product...

Hi everyone, I'm Bhavya, a Product Manager here at Atlassian. At our Team '25 conference, we announced a lot of innovations from the big stage. I want to share more about one in particular: Atlassi...

Here is my response on the Atlassian Community:

I was wondering why I kept hearing about Apps in the presentations and while I understand the reasoning behind, I think this is a hasty decision. From a technical architecture perspective Atlassian either have made some substantial technical changes or we still have foundation structures such as Jira, Confluence and even Align that all have their own codebases and platforms?

While I personally find it weird to refer to SaaS items as products, since they are Services, I do not think it makes sense to change from product to app. These are not mobile software, they are SaaS services. In a restructured architecture where you have an underlying infrastructure that these services are plug and play type of entities, that is what we use the term Module for.

This would provide a more logical holistic nomenclature where you have the foundation infrastructure, Platforms on top of that with Modules that provides the services and then plugins that extend the functionality of the modules.

- Infrastructure (Atlassian Cloud)

- Platform (Jira)

- Module (Jira, Jira Service Management)

- Plugin (marketplace "apps")

Naming two different types of items the same is not a good practice. I can already hear the confusion: "This is an app for the Jira app and no, it is not a mobile app, you have to install it on your SaaS... App."

Consider this change carefully because like Issues this will probably stick with you for the next 20 years or so, and it will be a pain in the... to change it again. Until you do, this will confuse people that actually think words matter.

 

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Now, please change the term "project" for Jira while you are at it since that is misguiding, and it adds a lot of confusion to a community of users that don't even know the difference between a project and an initiative: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8NqP8RBYOM

My thoughts: