The Disappearing App

In May of 2017, the veteran tech journalist Walt Mossberg wrote his final column (still an amazing read: https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/25/15686870/walt-mossberg-final-column-the-disappearing-computer). After 26 years of covering the technology revolution, his parting prediction was elegant and simple: the computer would disappear. Not die... dissolve; into our walls, our cars, our clothes. Technology would become so embedded in life that we would stop noticing it entirely.

He was right. And now it is happening again. This time, it is the app.

I remember when apps felt like magic. The first time you pinched to zoom a photograph and the world rearranged itself under your fingertips. The first time you hailed a cab from your couch and felt a little guilty about how easy it was. There was a moment, somewhere in the early 2010s, when every problem in human life seemed to deserve its own icon on a home screen. The app store was the new marketplace, and the download was the new handshake.

But look at how you actually use your phone today. You ask a question and an agent books the restaurant, checks your calendar, and messages your friend; all without you opening anything. A health alert reaches a nurse through a message thread she already lives in. A warehouse shelf reorders itself before anyone notices it was running low. The software is still working, working harder than ever, but nobody is using it. At least not in the way we understood that word five years ago.

This is not a small shift. For two decades, the entire technology industry has been organised around the app as the unit of value: downloads, daily active users, retention curves, ratings on a five-point scale. Businesses have poured billions into app portfolios, each with its own interface, its own onboarding, its own quiet army of support staff answering tickets at 3:00 am. What happens when the user never sees any of it? When the app sinks below the waterline and becomes infrastructure rather than experience?

What happens is that the competition moves. It stops being about who builds the most beautiful screen and starts being about who orchestrates the most intelligent outcome. The interface gives way to intelligence. The home screen becomes a relic. A generation from now, our grandchildren may look at the cluttered home screens of our phones the way we now look at floppy disks (yes, both the 5.25” and the 3.5” versions) — with affection, and a little disbelief that we ever lived this way.

The screen demanded our attention, intelligence will earn it.

I have spent three decades building technology and one thing has always been true: in every market, in every demographic, there are people who have effortlessly adopted emerging technology; and people who have quietly struggled with each iteration. The app era served the first group brilliantly and asked a great deal of the second. The future that is now taking shape promises something more generous: a technology that meets people where they are, rather than asking them to learn a new language to participate. That is true for a small business owner in Manchester as much as it is for one in Mumbai.

Will the disappearing app impoverish technology? On the contrary, I think it will humanise it. The screen demanded our attention, intelligence will earn it. The app made us its operators, the next era will let us be ourselves again. Present in our lives, asking for what we need, trusting that something quiet and capable is listening on the other side.

Mossberg saw the computer disappear into the room. The app is disappearing into the conversation. And somewhere in that disappearance, I think, we may finally find what technology was meant to do all along: get out of the way.