The Shift
With ever increasing communication between them, david chartier asks: When is an app no longer an app?
David Chartier asks: when is an app not an app?
As iOS becomes more sophisticated, our apps are beginning to disappear. I don’t mean that we’re downloading fewer apps; on the contrary, we’re downloading more than ever, and Apple recently made its largest quarterly developer payout in App Store history. But there’s a big shift happening in the way we use our apps and what they mean to us. As our apps become more powerful and useful, they’re also fading into the background of our day-to-day lives, posing both new challenges and opportunities for those who build them.
Gone are the days when the only way to use an app was to tap it on your Home screen. Over the last few major upgrades to iOS, we’ve gained features such as the Today view and its widgets, actionable push notifications, 3D Touch, the Share sheet, and the Apple Watch with its companion apps.
Third-party developers have also built their own system for letting apps talk to and automate each other, with tools like Launch Center Pro and Workflow (note: I’ve done some contract work for Workflow in the past). These mechanisms all enable features to live outside of their apps in various capacities, allowing you to do some pretty amazing stuff with just a couple of taps.
I’ve taken the time to make habits out of some of these features, and they really do open some amazing doors. I can select text in a Safari page and, with a couple taps, append it to a new article I’m writing in Ulysses, without ever opening the app. I can mark a task as completed from a Today widget without opening my task app. Email can be deleted or archived from a push notification without having to read the entire message. A contentblocking app, 1Blocker, works invisibly as a plugin for Safari, protecting my privacy on the internet, while a phone spam blocking app, Nomorobo, works the same way in the Phone app.
These apps and their key features are all tremendously useful. But I increasingly go days, sometimes weeks, without tapping or even looking at the original app. It certainly is convenient: I get more done in less time and fewer taps across myriad apps. But with apps more often fading into the background, it also means developers might need to find new ways to make their wares sustainable, like replacing one big purchase every two to three years with small, exceedingly affordable subscriptions. Some apps, such as photo editor Over, built a live chat system right in for feedback and support. It’s a great way to foster a relationship and build loyalty, which subsequently earned my subscription to its library of content for my client work.
Let’s step back from the details, though. In terms of having an assortment of pocketable tools for helping you accomplish all sorts of tasks, this app unbundling is starting to feel like the most significant evolution in apps since the store debuted. As apps integrate with iOS and each other in deeper ways, they’ll become even more indispensable, even if you barely ever see them.