Portable application

This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. (Learn how and when to remove these messages) This article may be confusing or unclear to readers. Please help clarify the article. There might be a discussion about this on the talk page. (April 2018) (Learn how and when to remove this message) This article possibly contains original research. Please improve it by verifying the claims made and adding inline citations. Statements consisting only of original research should be removed. (August 2009) (Learn how and when to remove this message) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

A portable application (portable app), sometimes also called standalone software, is a computer program designed to operate without changing other files or requiring other software to be installed. In this way, it can be easily added to, run, and removed from any compatible computer without setup or side-effects.^[1]

In practical terms, a portable application often stores user-created data and configuration settings in the same directory it resides in. This makes it easier to transfer the program with the user's preferences and data between different computers. A program that doesn't have any configuration options can also be a portable application.^[1]

Portable applications can be stored on any data storage device, including internal mass storage, a file share, cloud storage or external storage such as USB drives, pen drives^[2] and floppy disks—storing its program files and any configuration information and data on the storage medium alone. If no configuration information is required a portable program can be run from read-only storage such as CD-ROMs and DVD-ROMs. Some applications are available in both installable and portable versions.

Some applications which are not portable by default do support optional portability through other mechanisms, the most common being command-line arguments. Examples might include /portable to simply instruct the program to behave as a portable program, or --cfg=/path/inifile to specify the configuration file location.

Like any application, portable applications must be compatible with the computer system hardware and operating system.

Depending on the operating system, portability is more or less complex to implement; to operating systems such as AmigaOS, all applications are by definition portable.