Apps Are Dead; They Just Don’t Know It Yet
(AI Consequences #1)
The App has had its day. The several hundred icons you never use on your computing devices have been sub-optimal relics for decades already, but AI is about to render the whole paradigm entirely unmanageable.
Apps are containers that trap both data and capabilities. When software was scarce, that made sense. But AI is rapidly making software abundant — and now the container has become the bottleneck.
There’s no sensible way to organise access to apps. I have dozens of apps on my phone that seemed useful when I downloaded them, but now I have no idea what they do and no efficient way of finding out other than to run them. I know I have apps for image processing, but I have no idea which ones those are.
Hell, Apple’s “springboard” launcher on the iPhone has so little functionality that it is embarrassed by the 1984 original Mac Finder.
There’s also no real way to use apps together. That’s not even really a concept. The clipboard is a 1980s hack, and the share menu is just a slightly quicker form of the same simplistic idea.
Now enter AI.
People are already building apps in a couple of hours. I can barely manage the hundred or so apps on my phone today. Apple’s App Store has about 2.5 million apps.
When the cost of creating an app approaches zero, the idea that we should organise our digital lives around thousands — or millions — of separate apps becomes absurd.
The Political Economy of the App
The app paradigm didn’t arise because engineers thought it was elegant. It arose because it matched the economic moats of the software industry. Early on, the moat was distribution — shipping software was hard, so functionality was packaged as products. Later the moat became reliability and long-term support — businesses trusted large vendors like IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft to maintain complex systems for years. Then the internet introduced another moat: service infrastructure. Running reliable online systems required enormous operational expertise, so software again consolidated into tightly controlled applications that owned their data, logic, and interface end-to-end.
But those moats are eroding. Distribution is trivial. Infrastructure is commoditised. And AI is rapidly reducing the cost of producing software itself.
It turns out the app is not the natural unit of computing.
It is the natural unit of computing under conditions of software scarcity.
Beyond the Walled Garden
If the app was the natural structure of computing under software scarcity, what happens when software stops being scarce?
Once you start wondering what a world without apps might look like, things get interesting. For most of the history of computing, software organised data. But when AI begins dissolving those walls, the natural alternative appears: data organising software.
Right now I cannot process the data locked inside my apps in any way other than what the owners of those apps permit. We’re so used to this that it barely even occurs to us that things could be different.
But imagine something simple.
Maybe I want to compare how often I’ve used a particular word across all my writing over time. For a programmer that’s a small project. For most people it’s essentially impossible. Hell, not just impossible — unimaginable. It wouldn’t even occur to most people to even imagine such a thing.
Yet computers are pure thought machines. Any computable abstraction we can conceive is available to us. We should conceive more ambitiously.
Almost everyone in the world now carries an almost-free device capable of presenting real-time simulations of reality that are hard to distinguish from the real thing. These machines support sophisticated human interfaces — cameras, microphones, styluses, touchscreens, sensors, VR.
And yet our lives are still organised around windows and clicking icons like it’s fucking 1984.
No.
I refuse to believe that our current computing paradigms are anywhere near the peak of what we might do.
Try to forget your assumptions about what a computing device looks like and how it behaves. Imagine God’s iPad. Think about the tasks you actually want to do during your day.
Flatten the walls between apps. Imagine manipulating any data at any time, through whatever representation or interface makes sense. Imagine a world where Microsoft doesn’t own your words and your presentations, and you can do far more than what Microsoft has decided you should.
Set your imagination free.
You can see it dimly, right?
Maybe not in perfect detail. But you can certainly see how far it is from what we have now.
The future of computing will not be apps. It will be fluid computation over shared data.
Up next: how AI will transform APIs.