Apps Are Becoming Personalized...and Disposable! ✨
Apps aren’t disappearing. They’re being demoted...and quietly being redefined by AI assistants!
Hi everybody - for the longest time, apps were something special…and not in a good The Simpsons kind of way:
Apps were a heavy commitment. You committed to tools, frameworks, cloud providers, design systems, deployment pipelines, documentation, contractors, maintenance, and a whole lot more. Even using an app required commitment where you had to first find it, learn it, and tolerate everything it does beyond the one thing you actually needed. None of this is ideal, but that’s the best we had to work with.
Changing How Apps Are Built
Today, AI assistants remove two kinds of friction at once: the cost of creation and the cost of abandonment. Apps can now be created in minutes and just as easily discarded. That single change quietly breaks most of the assumptions we’ve had about software for decades.
For example, I recently had a need to generate OpenGraph metadata for articles I write to replace my earlier, hand-written version. This is a tedious and boring task, but I was able to use Claude and have a working app that helps me generate this in a matter of minutes:
With just a few prompts, this app was built on the fly for me with a feature set optimized exactly for what I defined and was looking for.
What Claude generated for me is technically an app. While it certainly doesn’t feel like one given how this app came to life, one can’t argue with the end result. After I am done using this app, I can choose to publish it (see here) or close my tab and never come back to it again. That the option to discard this app after one use even exists would be unimaginable in traditional apps but is of no consequence to this AI-generated app where my sunk cost in time or money is negligible.
Redefining Apps
Now, let’s take a step back for a moment. The important shift isn’t that AI can build apps. The shift is that users are no longer asking for apps at all. They’re asking for outcomes:
The outcome can be in the form of text, images, audio, video, or an interactive interface. The big thing to note is that these are all just delivery formats. Apps aren’t disappearing, but they’re losing their privileged status.
Focusing on apps for just a moment longer, we should recognize that the average user will have no idea about what apps are. All they will know is that they now have a solution to the problem they asked the AI assistant to solve. Implementation details that we used to care about as developers and spent the bulk of our time fiddling with will no longer matter. The AI assistant will take care of all the implementation details.
What people are becoming isn’t developers in the traditional sense. They’re describing problems, evaluating outputs, and iterating toward a solution. The AI assistant handles the rest.
Welcoming the New Winners
As AI democratizes app development, it abstracts away so many details that people and companies historically benefited from. In the example of the app I created in Claude, I never opened a code editor. I never applied any prior knowledge of web frameworks that I had. I didn’t hire a team of developers and designers to help bring my idea to life. While I had a shareable link to my published app, I don’t even know which backend cloud provider is being used to serve my app.
In this world, the most valuable product isn’t the app or the myriad of tools needed to bring the app to life. It’s the place where intent is expressed and outcomes are shaped. That’s where users will spend their time. That’s where value will accumulate. And that’s where the next generation of winners will emerge.
Conclusion
Before I wrap this up, I want to wish you all a very belated Merry Christmas and an early Happy New Year! There is a reason for my extended radio silence…
As some of you may know, I decided to leave Google and Firebase Studio and join Microsoft to lead a talented team of PMs sitting at the forefront of how Windows can be the foundation for AI capabilities. As part of this change, my family and I have been traveling around the world for the past month. We traveled from Seattle to Egypt (Cairo, Luxor, Aswan, Abu Simbel), UAE (Dubai, Abu Dhabi), India (Coimbatore, Salem), and then back to Seattle via Tokyo. Once things settle down and the jet lag wears off, stay tuned for my regularly scheduled programming to resume in a more timely manner.
As always, if you have any thoughts or comments about this, feel free to contact me by posting on Twitter / X or the forums.
Cheers,
Kirupa 😀