Are apps really being replaced by messaging?
There’s a growing narrative in Silicon Valley about the death of apps. To quote a TechCrunch piece from yesterday:
As the number of mobile apps increases while the size of our mobile screens decreases, we’re reaching the limits of the mobile “OS + apps” paradigm….
As an alternative, messaging apps are becoming the new platform, subsuming the role played by the mobile operating system.…The bot store is the new app store.
WeChat, Line, Facebook, Slack and Telegram are messaging platforms that enable interaction with third-party services from within the messaging interface. Each of these platforms enable developers to build messaging bots to provide automated services through the messaging interface — Facebook M is a good example. Which means we’re at the early stages of a major emerging trend: the rise of messaging bots.
It’s true that the sheer size of the app market is increasingly daunting for users. The way apps are distributed and organized (in my iOS-centric world, the App Store and the home screen) have not yet evolved enough to make this easy to handle. But are we really headed to a future where people interact with software primarily via text or conversational UIs?
I’m skeptical that text-based interfaces are a very good way of interacting with most software. If you know me, you know that I am not a big fan of the current flat, minimalistic trend in UI design ushered in by iOS 7, partially because the minimalism stripped away some valuable UI affordances — visual metaphors that convey information, such as a button that looks like something you could push in real life, or a dial that communicates both the currently selected state and how to change it. The loss of these affordances make software less attractive and harder to use, like having poor eyesight. But if minimalist UI design is like poor eyesight, text message UIs are like being completely blind. Writing a tweet via a messaging UI? You’ll have to wait until you send your message before you know whether or not it’s 140 characters. Ordering food? Good luck knowing what options are available and how much they cost.
Proponents of bots/messaging may argue that we will soon have AIs capable of carrying on real conversations — like talking to an actual person. Bullshit. Even if there were a real, live person on the other end, messaging still isn’t giving me the information I would get out of a rich, visual user interface. Bot proponents may then argue that messaging apps will augment the pure-text messaging experience with something much richer. But at that point, why not just use an app that provides the functionality you’re looking for? Won’t an app designed for its particular purpose always necessarily provide a better experience than a fancy text box?
Do bots actually solve the problem of app overload in the first place? I’m not sure. The proposed future of users interacting with bots via messaging rather than apps does not really solve the problems of how to discover or manage services to interact with; it just shifts the responsibility from the App Store to inside messaging apps. There are a ton of messaging apps—I count 15 on my phone, and Facebook makes at least 3 of them (WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram Direct). Many of the messaging players are working on platforms for these types of services. If messaging bots actually take off, we could end up with a scenario where I have to use a different messaging app depending on which service I want to interact with. That would suck.
Another reason I am skeptical of bots/messaging as an upcoming interaction paradigm is that some of today’s most successful companies have actively moved in the opposite direction over the years. Both Twitter and Uber started out as SMS-driven services, and have since both converted almost entirely into app-based experiences, because the experience is so much better that way. Critical features like Uber automatically knowing your current location and being able to show you a live map of the car require actual software to be running on your phone. Look at the apps that you use frequently. How many of them could you reasonably imagine using via a conversational UI? I count very few.
The few cases I can think of where messaging or conversational UIs would actually be useful are personal assistant scenarios. And I’m not sure how many of those there is room for in the market (though I certainly do hope that Apple moves to turn Siri into a platform so that it can be extended).
I think that text-based UIs are in some ways a backwards trend and don’t solve problems that users actually have. We should instead strive to create richer, more contextual, more meaningful user interfaces that give people maximal information and control, and are more fun to use.
(P.S.: A bunch of people I have a lot of respect for have different viewpoints on this and I’m sure there are things I’m missing. It sounds like there’s some pretty interesting evidence for messaging-based UIs in China. I’d welcome any other perspectives.)
