The End of the App
Designing for Intention, Not Interaction
In my most recent Shape of Tomorrow podcast, I explored a shift that’s not yet splashed across headlines but is already shaping our daily experience—the slow, quiet death of the app and the steady dissolution of platforms as we’ve known them. It’s not speculative. It’s not futuristic. It’s happening right now. But in this article, I want to push the conversation further. Because if you’re a leader building technology, shaping user experiences, or guiding strategy, there are urgent implications to unpack.
Apps used to be endpoints. Little icons we tapped to unlock function. That model is fading. Today, we are moving into a world where software is no longer a destination. It’s a presence. The difference isn’t just technical. It’s philosophical. Instead of designing things that users open, we must now ask how we create systems that live alongside them. Seamless, anticipatory, context-aware. We’re evolving from icons to outcomes. And if your product, your service, or your team is still optimizing for interaction rather than intention, you’re already out of step.
Look closely and you’ll see this shift everywhere. You use Slack to collaborate, but you might never open Google Docs separately to comment on a document. You ask Siri to book a table and it confirms the reservation by quietly working with OpenTable and your calendar without fanfare. Your AI-enhanced maps suggest your Saturday errands before you type a word. These are not just smarter features. They’re early evidence that the interface is dissolving. The app no longer needs to be the container. What matters is the orchestration, not the click.
Too many organizations, however, are stuck in an old model. They track metrics like time spent in app, daily active users, or screen flow. They polish UX and refine design systems while missing the more urgent transformation. Value is migrating from interface to intelligence. Time spent is no longer a sign of success. It’s a sign of friction. The real win today is time saved. Seamless resolution. Invisible enablement.
There are concrete steps to take. Start by shifting how success is measured. Move away from engagement as your guiding metric. Build KPIs around usefulness and seamlessness. Rethink product development as a service-layer strategy rather than a visual one. This means investing in systems, APIs, and data orchestration, not just front-end polish. Your app doesn’t need to be opened. It needs to be accessed by the systems your users already live inside.
Most importantly, begin designing for ambient intelligence. Ask whether your user experiences live in the interface or in context, preference, memory, and flow. Think less about where users are and more about who they are, what they need, and when. Intelligence is not about input. It’s about awareness. This is the leap that will define the next generation of product and strategy leadership.
I believe we are entering a phase that will make super apps irrelevant. They were one attempt to consolidate experiences into a single container. But containers are giving way to connective tissue. The winners in this next phase will not be those who control the destination. They will be those who own the journey. Not those who monopolize screen space. They will be those who inhabit decision space. Agents, not interfaces. Super context, not super app.
The questions we must ask ourselves now are more strategic than technical. Are we designing systems that our users visit, or ones that move with them? Are we spending our time refining buttons, or building orchestration? And is our competitive edge embedded in the user interface or in the unseen intelligence that powers outcomes?
If your AI strategy culminates in a chatbot or an app, you’re missing the point. Your AI must roam. It must anticipate. It must act on behalf of users without being summoned. This is not a nice-to-have. It is the new battleground, especially for those building in enterprise, in consumer tech, or in public systems.
As I said in the podcast, the transformation underway is not just technical. It is poetic. We are leaving behind a world of commands and icons, and entering one where the best software simply… shows up. Quietly. Thoughtfully. Helpfully. It doesn’t ask for attention. It earns trust by disappearing into the background and delivering value when and where it’s needed.
If that sounds like the future, it’s because it is. But it’s also the present. It just hasn’t been evenly implemented. And that’s where you come in. The end of the app is not the end of design. It’s the beginning of designing for something far more powerful: intention.