Better than free: A crypto business model for apps
hackernoon.com
hackernoon.com
http://consumer.findlaw.com/securities-law/what-is-the-howey...
But at this point you would probably need to build some anti-speculative functionality into your app anyways to prevent random "investors" from just hodling your supply.
Tokens have the capability of getting around those reguations.
Token issuers have a trickier road but it is possible to be compliant and not have a security, or compliant and have a security.
Currently in 2017 there are no compliant, or liquid, exchanges where you can trade tokens that are properly registered as securities. But this is not an absolute, as broker-dealers like Etrade, NYSE can trade securities even if they happen to be tokenized, they just aren't yet, but even when they will, they will be too slow and uncompetitive to noncompliant exchanges due to all the rule changes, and attitude changes necessary.
While existing decentralized exchanges obviously don't care whether the token is classified as a security or not because it is impossible for them to register as a broker dealer, and it is impossible for them to not facilitate the trading of any particular token.
So currently, token offerings simply don't register as securities because this would hamper their liquidity.
It won't matter in the very near future, as decentralized exchanges and the transmission functions, improve greatly, while centralized exchanges simply also become properly registered or legacy ones upgrade to trading tokenized securities. All while it is still possible for the issuers to be compliant with non-securities tokens.
But social applications are prohibitively expensive right now. Unless something like Plasma (Ethereum sub-chains) becomes a reality, Ethereum will only be useful for financial/authentication applications I think.