The coming extinction of the app
Long long ago, people used websites to purchase goods, communicate and get the latest news and info they needed. With the launch of the iPhone there was a brief moment in time where this honoured tradition had a chance to continue into the mobile sphere, in fact the late Steve Jobs intended to ban 3rd party ‘native’ apps on the iPhone altogether. But that decision was quickly reversed, and the rest is history. With people spending over 80% of their time on smartphones using apps, for shopping, hooking up, and photographing their meals apps seem here to stay. Or are they?
Just a few days ago Dutch airline KLM announced it will start allowing customers to checkin and check flight updates via Facebook messenger. Facebook launched its messenger platform for business about a year ago to enable exactly this type of interaction.
This follows an announcement earlier this year from messaging behemoth, WhatsApp that it will start allowing customers to communicate with businesses directly via their platform.
Starting this year, we will test tools that allow you to use WhatsApp to communicate with businesses and organizations that you want to hear from. That could mean communicating with your bank about whether a recent transaction was fraudulent, or with an airline about a delayed flight. We all get these messages elsewhere today — through text messages and phone calls — so we want to test new tools to make this easier to do on WhatsApp, while still giving you an experience without third-party ads and spam.
This is potentially huge, just imagine the convenience of skipping the automatic prompts and 30 minutes of holding when you try to contact your bank. Messaging enables this with the simple convenience of sending a text message. You can ‘fire and forget’ then get on with your day. Of course, it’s no coincidence that Facebook also owns WhatsApp.
For a clearer view of what this messenger-based future looks like, checkout WeChat. The massive, Chinese competitor to WhatsApp offers users access to millions of ‘apps’.
The lightweight apps on WeChat are called “official accounts”. Approved by WeChat after a brief application process, there are well over 10 million of these official accounts on the platform — ranging from celebrities, banks, media outlets, and fashion brands to hospitals, drug stores, car manufacturers, internet startups, personal blogs, and more
According to Connie Chan at VC Andressen Horowitz this makes WeChat is more like a ‘mobile operating system’ than a simple messenger tool. When, not if, Facebook and WhatsApp move further along this line, the way we access online services will be radically transformed.
Instead of searching Google we might ping a message prefaced with the instruction ‘/search’. To purchase an item off Amazon we might send a message like ‘@Amazon:7 habits of highly effective people’ and get an instant reply with the book we have in mind. Without leaving the messenger we could just type ‘/buy’ and the transaction would be complete (we’d have already stored purchasing and delivery details into the app. Paying bills for utilities and even conducting bank transactions could all be done from the same messaging platform.
In the near future we will spend our time communicating, searching for information and purchasing goods and services from within this messaging operating system. Many apps will be reduced to text messages, activated with the addition of a special character or a specific handle.
This is the future that Facebook is banking on. Without serious competition it would allow them to essentially control the successor to our current mobile web. Either way, using distinct apps in the way we do today will become largely redundant.
