Very little software runs by itself. You’ll need at least some form of libc to get the code running. Then there’s the graphics stack, where you need a runtime consisting of drivers, compositors, and all kinds of supporting software before you get even a pixel on the screen. It’s all APIs upon APIs upon drivers upon kernels. Even a command line tools needs a terminal emulator device to do any meaningful work these days.

Windows “apps” can be hidden browser frames or native C++ code and from look, feel, and behaviour, you wouldn’t notice the difference. iOS apps are basically just GUI programs, reusing many of the desktop toolkit in mobile form. Many “apps” built in frameworks like Flutter will take a Vulkan/GL context from the OS and do all GUI rendering directly, making them lower level programs than most OpenTK/Win32/Cacao applications.

I once made the distinction between apps and programs, but I realised every dividing line I could think of is rather arbitrary. The best I can think of is separating native code (C++. Rust) from JIT code (Python, Java) but even that distinction is starting to become blurry with JIT tookits being AOT compiled and C++ code being compiled into bytecode through things like webassembly.