[franticpedantic]

Based on my extra-curricular time learning Portuguese for the last year, I think Skype and Google Translate (as a slightly more useful dictionary) are a thousand times the transformational language learning tool than any of these apps are. No app or comprehensive program really impresses me too much (and I've tried most, including Rosetta Stone, Pimsleur) because most are boring, inhuman, and lack enough content. The most useful app I've used is Anki, but that's just a general purposes SRS rote learning tool for drilling.

The ability to get on Skype with someone from another country though is really a game changer, because there is no app that comes close to the ability to communicate with another human being, which is ultimately what language learning is about. There seems to be a fight or flight mechanism that forces you to adapt and try your best to understand the bare minimum of what the person's saying that just isn't there with software. I started Skyping with people from sharedtalk (based on a comment here) knowing very little Portuguese but just memorizing "can you type that?" and "can you repeat that?" and I felt I moved a lot more quickly than I did with Rosetta Stone. It did help that many Brazilians are eager for an English practice partner.

While I try to combine a wide variety of learning techniques, my experience and the experience of various other's that I've read is that "apps" to teach you a language are a lot less useful than books, native podcasts, TV shows, music, and Skype. So while I think that the internet has totally transformed language learning, I'm less convinced that any software explicitly for that purpose has.

[personlurking]

As someone who taught himself Brazilian Portuguese without apps or classes, I have to agree with you. It's all about the variety of approaches and the consistency with which you teach yourself.

As for the parent, if people aren't already learning via other existing media and/or methods, I highly doubt they will all of a sudden start, given the advent of apps. Mobile learning is the future because it's ubiquitous, not because it's game-changing.