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comment by mk
mk  ·  3461 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The End of Apps as we Know Them

    This new paradigm matches much more closely with how real life works. We don’t live our lives in silos, like the app silos that exist today. People start to forget about “apps” and just think about businesses and products and services. This is a great thing, the container for content should be invisible to users.

This is a pendulum swing. People want a measure of both. We do have silos in our real lives. We don't all sit at one table at Starbucks, and we don't mix with our friends, family, or coworkers agnostically. We also break our activities into physically and mental silos. Yes, having everything in its own app is inefficient when five of them are essentially notification streams, but you can't map that inefficiency onto everything.

It makes sense that things are more centralized on mobile than on the web, however. Limitations in space make it advantageous, and you have one referee controlling the interaction. This is one place where Apple might have an advantage. If app services start diminishing the experience, they can reign them in, and people are more tolerant of that on a phone. Once I have three notifications in a row that are irrelevant but arising from services that I need, shit is broken.