A book has an author. A magazine has an editor. A record has someone who decided the order of the tracks. In almost every form of cultural product, there is a figure responsible for the choices, someone who can be named, someone who owns it. Software, most of the time, does not have that. It is the product of a committee, of a process, of an average.
BLA treats its apps another way. A BLA app has an author, in the strong sense of the word: it has someone behind it with an opinion about how that thing should be. It is not the result of a committee seeking consensus, it is not what an A/B test pointed to as the winner, it is not the average of what the market does. It is a decision owned.
That is what the expression editorial product means, in practice. Editorial is not a visual style, it is not a palette, it is not a beautiful font. Editorial is the presence of a point of view. It is there being, in each decision of the app, an answer to the question who decided this, and why.
The difference shows up in the hard choices. When a committee decides, the tendency is the middle ground, the option that displeases the least, the lukewarm consensus. When an author decides, the option can be riskier, sharper, more opinionated. It may even be wrong. But it is a choice, not an average, and choices have form. Averages do not.
Having an author also changes the relationship with whoever uses it. An anonymous app owes no account to anyone. A signed app does. When there is someone behind it, there is someone who answers for what turned out good and for what turned out bad. The signature is, at the same time, a guarantee and an exposure. Whoever signs, commits.
It does not mean the app is perfect, or that the author always gets it right. Books have weak chapters, magazines have worse issues. It means there is coherence: the decisions talk to each other because they came from the same mind, with the same criterion. The app has unity, and unity is something a committee rarely produces.
That is why BLA apps manage to look like each other without being equal. They share an author, and the author carries a way of thinking from one app to the next. The whole line is, in that sense, an authored work in several volumes, not a catalog of disconnected products.
Software has an author too. It should not be a surprising phrase, but it is, because the industry got everyone used to treating an app as something that simply appears, with no visible hand. BLA insists on the opposite. Each app is made by someone, with an opinion, and that is the most important thing that can be said about it.