Interesting stuff! Its been fascinating to watch the pendulum swing in the past couple of years, and it feels like there’s so much potential on the horizon.

I am not sure if this is “rebundling” though — one of the motivators behind unbundling was also the fact that users simply did not want or need a ton of the features that often came with apps or a company’s broader product offering. Simplicity, when done right and with an authentic understanding of what equates simple and good, is the usually the gold standard of design, particularly in UX/UI. To re-use (and slightly warp for the sake of argument) the car analogy from the very beginning of this article, its more like: “imagine someone trying to sell you a radio, except it has wheels so you can drag it around and a bunch of dials which tell you things like the bpm of the music and how many times you’ve listened to that song”.

I see this next step not really as a rebundling but more of a move towards “Plug In Culture” where in we better understand why we would want to add features to a product outside its pure, core purpose and therefore understand how to augment that product by plugging in others. Chat bots and the gif search in messenger are a great example. FB has done a good job at opening up the opportunity of making messenger work in that way if the user wants it to, but doesn’t ask you when you open the app “do you want to message your friend? do you want to create a group chat? do you want to talk to a business? do you want to automate a service? do you want to search for a gif to send to someone? do you want to send a selfie?” which is what a lot of the heavily bundled apps of the past were very often guilty of.