Apps considered harmful
I can't believe how you all tolerate apps.
I know that apps - and desktop PC applications and web pages - aren’t going away quickly, but I hope that this article will contribute in a small way to their demise!
Think about your daily interaction with your smartphone. In fact, think about a day when you’re meeting up with some friends in town for a one-day seminar on growing your own vegetables. (OK, you think of an example!)
You probably use your phone’s apps instinctively to arrange and experience something like that, with messaging and photos and so-on.
So you must have become used to the way things are - and would find it hard to imagine how that experience could be any better.
But let’s watch you all as you progress through that day, using your apps...
You need scores of the bloody things
In order to access all of the digital stuff associated with arranging and attending this exciting day, you’ll have opened and used up to twenty apps.
Let’s go through all of the digital stuff - highlighted bold below - each of which will probably need its own app to interact with it:
Arranging the day:
documents with the venue info
calendar to put the date in everyone’s diary
contacts to look everyone up
emails with attendee CC: lists, for all the arrangements
group chat messages while arranging it in detail
weather to check if you’ll need a brolly on the day
On the morning:
alarm to alert you that it’s time to get ready
travel itineraries, map locations and routes
traffic and public transport disruption
music playlists to listen to on the train
games to play on the train
news feeds for catching up with the news on the train
phone calls for that last minute convergence at the meeting venue
texts when you want to be sure messages make it
At the venue:
photos and videos of the day
notes about what you learned
to-do lists for the activities you’re now inspired to take on
Coming back:
a shared to-do list for all of you to plan your next steps
more calendar events for meeting up again to buy stuff
posts to your friends with some photos and text about your day
your temperature controller to warm things up for your return home!
You can only see each type of data by running up the corresponding app; your data is trapped by its mediating or dominating app. So all day long you’re juggling and flipping between all of those apps.
All those apps won’t work together
So let’s see how well these apps all work together to support you in your day.
Spoiler: they don’t!
Starting with the arrangements: you have a calendar event with your friends all on it as attendees in your calendar app, but then you need to create the exact same list for a group in the messaging app. If someone drops out, they may or may not cancel their event attendance, but you’ll have to copy that to the group membership, keeping them in sync manually. The contacts for the calendar app may or may not be the same as those for the messaging app. And of course, creating an email mailing list for longer-form interactions is another manual challenge.
You may or may not be able to put a link to the event info on the calendar’s event; if you can then they may need an account on the site linked to, or its app, to see it. If there’s event info in a Word doc, then everyone needs an app that can read Word; likewise for PDFs, and in fact all shared file types.
On the morning: you have both the calendar event on the day and an alarm - which are both basically the same or very similar, but have two apps to access them, and there’s no tie-in between them, as the alarm isn’t date aware and the event’s start time isn’t your getting up time. Similarly, when you looked up the weather the day before for the combination of date and location, that information had to be re-entered from the event as calendars and maps don’t talk to weather apps.
Instead of having a single map and calendar dedicated to the trip, you have the Google map and calendar, the event website calendar event and maybe embedded map then another calendar and maybe map for the weather. You may have yet another social app with its own map to see where your friends are. Each app jealously replicates maps and calendars so you can’t just plot events and weather “events” on the same calendar, or the locations of all your friends on the same map as the event’s getting-there map. You get those two export buttons on the page, one for "Add to Google Calendar", the other "Add to iCalendar", which you’d need to remember to hit and re-import every time the event changed.
The train operator’s app or page doesn’t know your route so you have to manually project it onto their scattered info for the same time slots in the day and same train line segments, to see if there’s disruption.
You want to listen to music while playing a game but the sound level of the music drowns the game’s. Now if you’re lucky you’ll find the volume setting of each app in some idiosyncratic place, if there is one, or you may have to install yet another app to allow you to set per-app volume. You can share your music playlists and what you’re listening to with your friends, but only if they have the same app.
You want to have a catch-up with the news so out comes the news app. There’s actually an article there on growing your own veg, so you excitedly hit “share”, and this time you can choose the messaging app group to post it there. And when your friends that don’t have the same news app hit the link, they get directed at a web page with the same story. But because all companies want you trapped in their apps, the web page doesn’t run well or look the same. It may be missing features or the comments.
Approaching the destination, you spark up the app for sending texts, as you trust the SMS telecoms infrastructure more than the internet that each of you could have access to while out and about, but this app has no idea about the group of people you’re meeting, so you have to search for each person and text the main one to see where they are. At least as you get closer you can switch easily from texting to phoning, even though texting, phoning and contacts are oddly three separate apps.
Once at the venue and learning all about veg, you’re furiously taking notes in your notes app, and snapping pictures with your camera app. But try dropping a relevant photo into the middle of the notes - not impossible but the friction would put you off most times.
You make a to-do list of things that you and your friends can get started on with a joint project, including getting an allotment. You look at the locations of allotments on a map. But of course, as soon as you close the map app, that’s all lost. There’s probably a way of getting a link to each location in turn, but not more than one at a time, and you could drop the links into your notes, but would also need to drop it into a related to-do where, in neither case, would you be able to see the map where you dropped the link; you’d have to click the link and let it bring up the map app again.
Try tying up the section of the notes about fertilisers that corresponds to the specific to-do for buying some. One to-do says that you’ll all meet up to buy some seeds, but now you need to flip to the calendar to make the date, and the to-do is unable to show that, or, again to link to the section of notes where you wrote about seeds. You took some pictures of different seeds. You can drag that into the notes, the to-do or the calendar event, but which? It’s kind of needed in all the apps. It would be nice for all three to connect somehow, but even if you have some kind of links you can paste, it’s hard work.
All this without even “sharing” these items with your friends - another multi-app, fragile task. You can’t create and share new to-do lists per friend with selected jobs that get ticked off in both places when done.
On the way back, you’d like to create a social media post about your day, with photos and some text. The chat group list can’t be used to publish just to them, so you create a post for all friends only, including everyone else in your social life. So you create the post in one social media app, but there are different people you also would like to reach in another app. Even though both apps are owned by the same company, you’d have to search how to re-publish your post to the other app, as every app works differently and nothing is ever simple. Even if you did figure it out, the second post wouldn’t update when you edited the first. In the end you give up and copy-paste the text into a new post and re-add the photos, but miss one out by mistake. Sometimes you can get a link to a post in one app and drop it into a post in the other, but how that turns out, whether it shows all the post embedded, or just a bare link, is entirely at the discretion of the target app’s marketing department and what they want you to be able to do this month. They’ve been known to refuse links to certain competitor’s apps. And sometimes the link is useless if you don’t have an account there.
You stare out the window, remembering when you were a kid and used to make pinboards and scrapbooks, where you could create a theme or topic. It would be nice if you could do that with your notes, to-do lists and photos from today. You sigh at the thought of how you’d have to search for another app for that. You decide you’ll literally print the whole lot out later, and use a real pinboard!
You flip to your home automation app to set the temperature to warmer for your return. It occurs to you that if only the home automation knew about today’s calendar event, it could work that out for itself. You are just about to create a to-do for researching that automation feature, but your thumb’s starting to ache now…
Some sharing between apps is allowed
If anything does work between apps, it won't be done consistently or seamlessly. You can “share”, meaning copy, in a clumsy way, from one app to another, but all context and meaning is lost in the process and being a copy it won’t reflect any updates.
In fact, sharing “this here” is so inconsistent and hard to do that you often end up simply doing a screenshot!
Sometimes you're strangely allowed access to the same data in two apps - like contacts between the contacts app and the phone app or allowing photos to be seen in each app - but that's rare and feels different for each case.
Apps can "trigger" each other to run, with some hidden parameters, like the phone call app, but it doesn't feel like a smooth integration, as it often fails, or the hidden info doesn't get used correctly.
Something like a messaging app may trigger a web browser from a link, but sometimes that only happens if you turn off the in-app browser (somewhere in the settings) because they want to keep you trapped inside their app! Some apps or web apps try to scare you when you want to jump a link outside of the app, with a big warning page: “you are about to leave the safety of this app trap and go somewhere in the wild - are you sure you want to do that?”
Found the app’s data file? Sorry, it’s useless to you
Hoping to break free of an app, perhaps to switch to another app, or at least to feel that your precious stuff is safe? If it’s the photos or gallery app, you’re in not too bad a shape, as all photos and videos will be stored in a standard format. Well, videos less so, but still not too bad.
But you’ll notice they still try to keep you away from the actual photos on the filesystem. And in general, filesystem explorers are frowned upon, as they give you a bit too much insight into, and control over, your own digital stuff outside of apps.
If it’s data the operating system looks after, like contacts, then you may be able to switch apps easily enough, but now some of your most precious data is at the mercy of Google or Apple. And getting a complete interoperable dump of that data is not for the average non-techie.
But it’s those evil apps that store your data in a proprietary format that are your biggest concern. And it’s not something you’re likely to consider when first installing the app - only 10 years down the line, when you want to change your notes and to-do app and realise that a decade of your life that you’ve carefully transferred from device to device could all be lost to you, because only Colornote can see all of your stuff. You were lucky that the company kept trading the whole time.
Apps are good for them, but bad for you
So hopefully you’ll now realise that you’ve been gaslighted all these years into believing that all this friction that you experience when using all those apps is your problem or just your lack of technical ability, or your technophobia.
If after all that you don’t now see how toxic, how dis-empowering and imprisoning apps are - along with the operating systems that support, enable and give oxygen to them - then, well, you’re welcome to that prison!
I know that many, perhaps even the majority of people on the planet, actually prefer the comforting warmth of these prisons and their familiarity. Sadly, most people like to be told what to do and accept what they can’t do. I call that institutionalised.
For the rest of you who can see the costs of this “app-trapped” digital life, it’s time to wake up and demand better! The “app trap” wraps chains around the intuitions you have about how reality works.
You should demand technology that works around you as a human being - technology that frees and empowers you.
An OS without apps
The solution is to build an operating system (OS) that has no apps! It will need building from the ground up. My approach is an OS that turns apps inside out.
Instead of our data being fragmented and locked away inside the many app-trap prisons, I want it to be free and out in the open.
It will all live in a single, shared 2D/3D virtual world, where things work just like they do in reality. Here it can all be seen together and mashed together however we like.
In the real world, you can paperclip a note to a date on the calendar that’s hanging on your wall, next to that pinboard covered in photos and notes.
Now, to completely turn apps inside out, it’ll be the functionalities and behaviours of all the apps that are fragmented and tucked away: inside or behind our data. Just like the way formulae live inside or behind spreadsheet cells. In fact, just like in reality where everything is internally animated: you don’t have a “dog app”, you just have a “dog”!
That’s what this project is all about: turning our experience of computers from hostile and un-natural to intuitive and familiar.
Welcome to your freedom and empowerment over technology!
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So well-said!