This is a dessert salad, just like strawberry pretzel salad is. It's meant to be served as a dessert in warm weather. Some people add caramel sauce as the "dressing." Sounds like a dessert to me! Just because it has apples in it doesn't mean it's a salad course, like a green salad or Greek salad. Those are generally meant to be savory.
I'd say the same thing about all those gelatin "salads" that were so popular in the 1970s. They always were sweet, and had stuff like marshmallow cream and lime flavored Jell-O. Sorry, but that's a dessert, not a main course! Even the cranberry gelatin salad we had at Christmas was more of a dessert, although we ate it with the turkey, just like we did cranberry sauce.