Google wants it so Google gets it. From PCMag.
Excerpt:
Google prevailed in ICANN’s public auction for the top-level domain, paying just a hair over $25M for the rights to .app. It’s reportedly the highest purchase price yet paid for a top-level domain in an ICANN auction. It was more more than triple the price of the previous record-holder, Dot Tech LLC and its $6.8 million winning bid this past September for the rights to .tech.
“The mission of the proposed gTLD, .app, is to provide a dedicated domain space for application developers. The term ‘app’ is associated with a wide variety of applications, including mobile applications, web- and browser-based applications, cloud-hosted applications and even desktop applications,” reads the top-level domain application from Charleston Road Registry, Google’s registry services company.