I think we need a more radical change: dissolve apps into the operating system.
Many of my frustrations today come from the sharp line between apps and OS. Apps have custom storage formats, custom UIs, and custom settings, and that makes it difficult for a user to deal with their data holistically. Even something as trivial as searching across all my data is not a solved problem, and that's because every app has a different way of representing data.
But what is an app? An app is just a UX/UI on top of a data model with domain-specific rules for transforming that data. What if we could decompose those pieces: the UX is just a custom control; the data model can be represented by a standard database; the domain-specific rules can be a headless component.
The decomposition gives the user more control: all my data is in a standard database. I can drive headless components via script or agents. And I can compose my UX based on my preferences instead of how the app decided to package it.
Many of my frustrations today come from the sharp line between apps and OS. Apps have custom storage formats, custom UIs, and custom settings, and that makes it difficult for a user to deal with their data holistically. Even something as trivial as searching across all my data is not a solved problem, and that's because every app has a different way of representing data.
But what is an app? An app is just a UX/UI on top of a data model with domain-specific rules for transforming that data. What if we could decompose those pieces: the UX is just a custom control; the data model can be represented by a standard database; the domain-specific rules can be a headless component.
The decomposition gives the user more control: all my data is in a standard database. I can drive headless components via script or agents. And I can compose my UX based on my preferences instead of how the app decided to package it.