The future is no longer apps
When I joined the tech world in the early 2010s, it was the golden age of apps. Opening the App Store on my early iPhones was a thrill of constantly discovering new companies and apps making new categories of things possible. That era has passed now, but some things have stayed the same: namely Springboard, the app launcher on iOS & every iOS-adjacent OS (iPadOS, watchOS, tvOS, visionOS). Apple products always greet you with a grid of apps to choose from.
It’s never been articulated as boldly and incorrectly as by Apple as with the launch of tvOS nearly a decade ago: “The future of TV is apps,” Tim Cook declared. Apps had been on a constant ascent up, with the iPhone and iPad App Stores in their golden ages. Bringing that magic formula, where developers provided the majority of the software (read: value) for customers while paying Apple for the privilege, seemed like a surefire way to modernize any other computing device Apple could make. The prior Mac App Store’s lukewarm reception by both users and developers could be explained away by its lack of exclusivity as a distribution channel.
The Mac has held onto its files-first identity, only recently layering in widgets to the desktop to be more familiar to iPhone customers. The Mac’s files grid has fallen behind for a different reason: most of our files don’t exist on our desktops anymore. Professional tools that use files as their primary metaphor, like Figma & Notion, or even ones that have file-shaped organization/home screens, like Airtable, all exist in parallel but disconnected universes from our file systems. Local-first software based on your file system, like Obsidian where I’m writing this, may be a thriving scene, but it remains tiny in mind/market share and overwhelmingly for solo work.
The Mac App Store’s flop was prescient: no other Apple App Store has caught on like the original. Today, while Apple TV is the highest-quality streaming box available, it is not because of apps. The dream of Airbnb & Zillow & shopping & cooking apps running on Apple TV is long dead; even Vimeo, which is the most streaming-service-adjacent “app” an independent company could make, discontinued their Apple TV app. Yet the tvOS homescreen continues to be dominated by an app grid everyone uses two rows of to switch between Apple TV/HBO Max/Netflix/etc. The most “app” experience I use is Apple Fitness+, a thin layer of software on top of a streaming service.
Apple tried applying the App Store + Springboard formula to more platforms after Apple TV: iMessage apps, watchOS, then most recently, visionOS. iMessage apps failed and were demoted to a second-level menu last year. On watchOS, apps are useful for providing notifications, complications, and widgets—the latter two of which are superior launchers to icons, and should replace the app grid. These App Stores are presently wastelands, with barely a notable launch per year.
iPhone’s success means many companies blindly followed the App Store model without question, from smart fridges to Leap Motion VR. While I’m a huge fan of my Daylight DC-1, the vision of a slate designed for reading & writing is hindered by a familiar scene on its home screen: a grid of six apps. Where I want to see what I’m reading & jump back into my writing/notes, these corporate silos get in the way of gliding into creative work and artificially separate workflows.
Apple’s App Store dream feels more broken than ever on visionOS. How spatial computing will progress is far too early to declare. As excited as the concept makes me, though, Springboard does not. I want physical-feeling tools and workspaces filled with digital content, not app icons. Springboard serves to make spatial computing familiar to iPhone users, not because it’s appropriate to the context.
In a spatial computing environment, I want to fluidly create, transform, and share content. I want to enter the space for watching TV & see shows from every streaming service, not open separate apps with unique interfaces for every service. When someone AirDrops me a file, I want to manipulate it with my hands and save it in space. I want to easily share any object/stream into the room for everyone else nearby, so we have a shared sense of digital reality. It’s an indignity that the headset isolates you to your own unshareable reality, and atomizes each experience inside it. Wearing Apple Vision Pro, to press the Digital Crown to open the app launcher breaks the illusion of the augmented view, reminding you of the metal contraption stuck to your face instead of letting you manipulate reality inside it. The hand gesture in visionOS 2 is a start, but its literal rendering of the OG iPhone Home Button is a stark representation of the lack of fresh thinking.
Apple’s category-defining label for Apple Vision Pro of “spatial computer” rings hollow because its app model, with distribution solely by Apple’s byzantine rules, prevents the device from being a computer: the company bans software that can create software from running on the platform. It’s a frightening vision of what computers should be to ban the fundamental act that willed the platform into existence, shutting the door on the next generation from discovering the joys of coding, designing, and constructing new devices & experiences.
Apple employs thousands of wildly talented designers & engineers who have undoubtedly cooked up dreams of new kinds of spatial experiences outside the silos of apps. The company’s business success two decades ago now prevents them from seemingly ever innovating on this model, creating these unintuitive app-launching flows, importing technologically-ancient iconography, and pulling up the ladder on the next generation from the tools to imagine differently. Apple’s penchant for refinement over re-envisioning software means I don’t expect this model to change anytime soon, but it’s a damn shame their boldest platform yet has such an uninspired core organizing principle.