Last week I completely wiped my phone (by accident), and lost all my apps, photos, and random files I had on it. However once I reset it, and was trying to re-download all the apps that I used to have, I realized a few things. Firstly, most of the apps I had, I rarely used. Secondly, of that apps I couldn’t live without, why couldn’t they do more? I mean there are times when it is handy to find out which constellation you’re standing under, or how to workout your abs for 7 minutes. But in general, these are few and far between.

Ask yourself, would you go to one restaurant to get your appetizer, another to get your main course and a third for dessert? I think not. But that is how we treat apps.

What I’m suggesting is that the tertiary ‘app culture’ will slowly die.

Think for example of all the tasks you do on your phone — I’d bet that most of them revolve around a few central Ideas: social (fb/text/calling), visual (camera/video) and location (maps). So why not centralize the way other apps are built, and allow them to be built directly into the ‘core’ apps you use. Take restaurant reservations; you can use the opentable app, the yelp app, or even the google app, but what you’re really trying to do is find a location to eat. So why not build that into ‘maps’? If you’re trying scan a barcode to get a price comparison; all you’re really doing is taking a picture — so why not build that into the ‘camera’? What about sharing real-time location data with your friends via. text message when you’re getting picked up. Or even having your phone’s keypad act as a menu for company directories? Why isn’t Instagram built into your camera? Why isn’t Twitter built into your text messages and notes? The possibilities are endless.

I believe that the more mature the phone market gets, the less work we will want to do to get the results we already are accustomed to. Now it may sound lazy, and it is defintely a first-world-problem, but opening an app to do a single task is just silly. What we need is for app developers to open up their apps for other developers to build apps inside. I mean after all, this is technology we’re talking about.