The Age of the App Is Over

We’ve spent the last few decades getting to the point that we can now give everyone on earth a cheap, reliable, easy-to-use pocket computer with access to a global information network. But so far, though over 4bn people have one of these things, we’ve only just scratched the surface of what we can do with them. There’s an old saying that the first ... See more

for nearly fourteen years afterwards, I stared at a smartphone every single day. Five thousand days, all in all. I can’t think of anything else I’ve done with the same level of commitment. There have been days where I’ve had nothing to eat or drink and there have been nights when I didn’t sleep. But until very recently, I never once went twenty-fou... See more

In other words, instead of “one app to rule them all,” which was never realistic and is getting even less so, we’ll have dedicated “capture apps”( like Evernote) that specialize only in capturing and organizing content, alongside other kinds of apps (like Obsidian, Tana, and Mem) that specialize in distilling and expressing new ideas.

To make things worse, it turns out that the desktop metaphor underlying so much of our computing was not equipped to handle it either. In response to the increased stimuli, our Desktops simply started generating more clutter. Windows upon windows of tabs and tabs, folders within folders of Untitled(1). Never-ending, nebulous clutter.