What is an ap file and how do I open an ap file?

An Amiga archive file is a compressed file used by the Amiga system to distribute programs or applications developed for the Amiga system, which were originally distributed via floppy disks. Since the data storage capacity of a floppy disk was limited to only a few kilobytes of data, Amiga developers created a compression format that can reduce the size of Amiga application files. This compression format was integrated with source code compilation specifications that can be implemented into Amiga applications, and data encoding standards were also integrated into this compression format to also support the compression of other types of files that can be copied from an Amiga system. These compression specifications are implemented into the content of an Amiga archive file, and data encoding standards are also integrated into the data stored in an Amiga archive file so it can be stored in the AP file format. These Amiga archive files are affixed with the .ap extension. There are other programs that implement the AP file format into its processes, though for different purposes.