The phrase “everything app” has been with us for about a decade now, and like all categories invented to flatter a single product, it’s done a tremendous amount of work to confuse the conversation. The pitch is simple. One app, all the verbs. Pay your friend. Hail your ride. Date your match. File your taxes. Watch your show. Argue with your senator. The interface is the country.
The trouble is that the interface, as designed, is not a country. It’s a holding company in a font. The longer you live inside it, the more you notice that the verbs all route through the same noun, and the noun is increasingly bored of you.
One app, all the verbs. The interface is the country. The country is on fire.
— From "OPTIMUS AND THE UNCANNY VALLEY OF LABOR"
Western consumers tried this once before, with mixed-to-poor results. The category exists in Asia for reasons that have less to do with product genius than with permissive regulators, banking deserts, and twenty years of state-aligned investment. Those are not transferable. They are conditions. The thing that worked there, we should be honest about, worked there because of conditions there.
Which doesn’t mean nobody should try. Try as much as you like. But the trying should not be confused with succeeding, and the press release should not be confused with the product, and the product, when it ships, should be evaluated on the merits, which include “does anyone actually use this for the thing it claims to do.”
Anyway. The everything app eats itself because there is no edge. Every feature it adds is a feature that competes with every other feature, for the same attention, in the same screen, and the user — that is, you and me, and that one friend who needs to hear this — eventually decides that the friction of switching apps was not the real friction. The real friction was being asked to live somewhere we didn’t choose.
The bird has flown. The interface remains. The country, increasingly, is on fire.