The "App Gap", Windows Phone has been struggling with it since the beginning.
Firefox OS Blackberry OS,
webOS, Symbian and all the other IOS and Android
competitors have all failed at least in part because of it. Without users,
nobody will want to develop an app for your platform, without apps nobody will want to use your platform.
Chicken, egg,
Marton, 'The
Story Behind' series, Episode 8
Pretty much everything you do on your smartphone right now, you do through an app. You Facebook through Facebook
WhatsApp through WhatsApp, and you Snapchat through Snapchat. Unless of course you are on a windows phone, in which case
you don't snapchat. Sure, you can skip some of the apps like watching YouTube in your phone's browser for example
But do you really want to? No, no you don't. You want the app.
Just like in the 1990s, every company figure out that they have to have a website. In the 2010s,
everyone and their grandmother figured they need their own app. Apps have become the default way to get things done these days,
but what about the
2020s? Or even the
2030s? Will apps remain the one true way to do everything?
I doubt it, see, apps are actually quite a hassle to both users and developers. For the user, each app requires to be found
downloaded and installed, and then each one looks and acts differently so each has to be learned.
They also use up your phone storage and RAM and other resources, and even a spot on the oh, so
valuable home screen. Sure, these are all small problems
But they are kind of annoying, if a user could turn on the flashlight or order a pizza without having to go through the hassle
of getting a whole new app they would probably prefer that. Now on the other hand,
designing, developing and constantly maintaining an app is a lot of work too. Sure,
some companies like Facebook or game producers for example, make money directly from users
you know, using their app,
but most companies just have the apps as an interface between the company and the
customers. If you're an airline, you just want people to buy your tickets, if you're Uber,
you just want people to take rides with Uber and so on. That interface between you and the customer is necessary,
but what if it didn't have to be a
designated app? If you could sell tickets and Uber rides without having to spend your time making the interface yourself,
you'd be more than happy, right?
So if apps are such a hassle for both sides, then surely there will be a better solution in the future. And
I have three distinct possibilities in mind. The least revolutionary one is already happening, but you might not have noticed it yet.
I'm talking about "superapplications", of course, apps that combine features from tons of other apps.
The best example of this would be WeChat, and, to some extent, Facebook
WeChat started out as a messaging app in China
but has transformed into the biggest super application in the world, with over
800 million users. On top of messaging and social media, it works as a digital
wallet, so users can send and receive money online, and pay for things in the real world like you would with, say, Apple Pay in
a grocery store. The app has an e-Commerce platform and a customer service platform built in, and
users can book flights and bus tickets, call a taxi, pay bills and do just about everything imaginable
through it. Suddenly, a user can make transfers without using, say, the PayPal app,
call a taxi without opening the Uber app for example, and so on. And these
replacements are already happening. The second method I can think of is a little bit more futuristic, and yet
it sounds like a bad joke from the early 2000s.
Chatbots, yes, I know they usually suck, but with a little bit of help from artificial intelligence, that should soon change.
Microsoft is betting big on bots
and, if you open up a newer version of Skype, you can find a whole list of them, And
some of them want to replace your apps.
The sky scanner app, for example, is my favorite place to find cheap flight tickets and believe it or not,
they have a Skype bot.
I can simply type in dates and destinations,
and it will show me flights that I can interact with. There's also a UPS
bot that helps you track packages, and a meme creator that, you know, creates memes.
That's all pretty basic for now, but bots on Skype
just came into existence, and it's not hard to see how they could eventually replace a lot of the apps, we're using.
Facebook is apparently also working on bots inside messenger,
And I imagine others do too. The third, and most advanced method is virtual assistants, Siri, Google
Assistant, Cortana and Alexa are the biggest players for now.
And they're essentially just more universal and more advanced chat bots if you think about it
They can already do things like searching the web, finding new restaurants nearby,
identifying the song that is playing on the radio, calling you an Uber,
Controlling your Philips Hue lightbulbs, or your Sonos speakers, and some, like Amazon's Alexa for example, are connected to your credit card
so they can even make purchases for you right away.
Those are all things you previously needed dedicated apps for, and one by one, feature by feature,
these assistants are making those apps redundant. Of
course, some apps can't easily be replaced by the above three methods, such as games and professional applications, like
Photoshop and Office.
I mean,
I would love to live in the future, where I can just tell Cortana to edit my videos and
then return in half an hour to have everything done, but that's still a few decades ahead,
I think. Still, even for apps and programs like these, there will be improved streaming. Nvidia, Steam,
Xbox, PlayStation and many others are already offering some sort of game streaming to PCs and phones, and
HP for example, enables users to run classic,
Win32 desktop applications on its Elite X3 phone by having them streamed from an HP server.
So you can actually use Photoshop on your phone. With internet
connections improving, streaming apps should eventually become a pretty good experience, and this means that even those
complex apps and programs that, for now, have to remain absent programs could run on just about anything, even hardware that they weren't
specifically written for.
So while in
2016 the interface for every single service a user wants to enjoy is generally a dedicated new app,
I think this won't be the case in a decade or so.
Most Routine services will be replaced by some sort of aggregator, like superapps,
assistants and
bots, while more complex ones will probably either remain as they are now, or be streamed to the user's device. And
this new way of getting things done will have profound
effects on the industry. Many developers won't spend their time developing their own apps,
but instead will work on feeding info through APIs into other
aggregator services, like the Google Assistant for example. On top of today's
classic optimizations like improving your app's position in the app store and your website's ranking in a Google search,
developers of the future will also optimize their services for things like Siri or Cortana or
some sort of chat bot for example. That will be the real competitive advantage
after all
When the user tells Cortana to call a cab, the service with the best Cortana
integration will be the one to get the cab after all. Now this is both great and terrifying for service providers,
complexity will be significantly reduced for them, because they won't have to maintain a whole app, of course, but this
convenience comes at the cost of freedom.
Skype can decide whether it lets Skyscanner put the bot into their app or not, it decides how it ranks different bots,
what features these bots can have, and what they can look like and so on.
The same way Google Assistant pretty much decides
which one the best Mexican restaurants in your vicinity are when you ask it.All the power is going into the hands of these aggregators,
service providers have to optimize for them, pay them for a better ranking and
communicate with users through them, which will make these aggregators incredibly influential.
This transition will also mean that the app gap, as it is won't really matter anymore, because the number of apps that are present on a
platform won't be the deciding factor in how many services the user can access.
Instead, the question will be how good the chat bots, the
virtual assistants, the super
applications and the app streaming on a platform are, and how many services those can tap into. And since most of the
integration between a service provider and an aggregator happen on the back-end,
it means that suddenly all of these services can be present on any OS or platform that the aggregator is present on.
And actually getting an aggregator to go to a new platform where a new OS is
pretty simple, or at least much more simple than getting millions of apps to move.
Skype and Cortana for example, are present on every major platform,
Windows PCs, Windows Mobile devices, Android phones, iOS devices,
and, in pretty much any browser too. And so is every external service that ties in with them,
think about this, it essentially means that in the future, the number of services that you will be able to use will depend
more on the choice of your personal assistant than on your choice of an operating system.
And that will be the end of the app gap and
possibly the start of a whole new kind of gap. Let me know in the comment section below,
what do you think we should call it? You can vote for things like the AI gap, the virtual assistant
gap, or the chatbot gap.
And also let me know in the comment section below, what do you think, do my predictions for the future make any sense or not?
And if maybe I missed something completely and something entirely different will happen.
In either case, subscribe to the channel if you enjoy this kind of content,
I'll be making more into story behind series and also give this video a like if you enjoyed it, and
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