Nope, routing is required but you can that pretty easily by using the core/routes.php as the file where you instantiate the container, you can do it in exactly the same way as apps do it, e.g. https://github.com/owncloud/news/blob/master/appinfo/routes.php#L20. Regarding the container: pass 'core' to the parent constructor as appname.

The only thing that Im not fully sure is if core prepends the /apps/APPNAME or if the appframework routing does it, but I havent found anything in the appframework code