Transcript
I was asked recently if I want an app created for my online community. It would be great, I was told. More engagement. Better experience. Everything in one place. All I had to do was pay for it.
I said no.
Not because I'm anti-technology. Not because I don't care about my community. But because I asked one simple question that apparently nobody had asked before: what problem does this actually solve?
The answer? None. The app would be a wrapper around my existing website. Same content. Same features. Just dressed up in a shiny package that lives on your phone, demands your storage, and asks for your notification permissions. A bookmark disguised as innovation.
And this, right here, is what I want to talk about today. Not apps as a technology. But apps as a symptom of lazy thinking. On both ends.
Let me start with the organizations building and buying these things. There is a whole industry — and a very profitable one — built around selling organizations the idea that they need an app. Schools. Local governments. Community managers. Healthcare providers. It doesn't matter what you do. Somewhere, someone is pitching you an app.
And the pitch is always the same. It's about engagement. It's about modern communication. It's about providing a better experience for your users, your clients, your parents, your students — whoever your audience happens to be. What the pitch almost never includes is this: have you asked your users if they want it? Have you mapped out what behavior change you are forcing on them just to use this thing? Have you considered that the problem you're trying to solve might already have a perfectly fine solution that doesn't require anyone to download anything?
No. Because those questions are bad for sales.
My daughter's school recently pushed an app. Every parent is now expected to use it. Communication goes through it. Announcements go through it. If you're not on the app, you're out of the loop. Nobody asked us if we wanted this. Nobody asked whether it was better than the email system that was already working. It was presented as a done deal — here is the app, download it, use it.
That is not serving your users. That is forcing your users to serve your preference for looking modern.
And this is the core of what the app-selling industry does. These companies are very good at explaining the benefits of an app. For the organization. The organization gets a branded presence. A dashboard. Analytics. A conversation piece in the next board meeting. It looks like progress. It looks like investment in the relationship with your audience.
But what does the actual user get? Another icon on their home screen. Another set of notification permissions to manage. Another account to create. Another password to forget. Another piece of software that may or may not work as advertised — that they had no say in choosing, and in many cases no option to refuse. The user's experience was never really part of the conversation. It was just assumed that a shiny new app is obviously better than whatever came before. That assumption is lazy. And it costs real people real time.
Now here is something the marketing material never mentions: most of these apps are not real apps.
They are websites wearing a costume.
I use an app to record my energy meter readings. Every time I open it, I wait. And then I wait some more — because it is loading data from the web and rendering it inside a container that pretends to be a native application. It is slower than a browser tab. It performs worse than a well-built mobile website would. The only reason it exists as an app is so that the company behind it could say that they have one.
I used the Circle app for a long time. Circle is a community platform. The app worked fine — until they updated it and changed enough functionality that it became unusable for what I needed. So I switched to the web version, saved a bookmark to my home screen, and that was it. Guess what? It works better. It loads faster. No forced updates. No permission creep. No storage drain.
The app was never the product. The app was the packaging. And when the packaging started getting in the way of the product, the product worked better without it. This is what I call the wrapper lie. Organizations — and the vendors selling to them — have convinced themselves that putting a web service inside an app container automatically adds value. Sometimes it does. When there is genuine native functionality involved — real camera integration, GPS, offline capability, hardware access — an app makes sense. But most of the time it does not. Most of the time, a properly built mobile website with a home screen bookmark gives you everything the app delivers, without the overhead.
But a bookmark does not look impressive in a board presentation. You cannot put a QR code to a bookmark on a poster and call it a digital transformation strategy.
Now let me turn this around, because organizations are only half the problem. The other half is us.
There's an app for that. We have said this phrase so many times, it has become a reflex. Something needs doing — check the app store. Something is frustrating — is there an app that fixes it? We have trained ourselves to treat apps as the default answer to any question, and we have largely stopped asking whether the app is actually better than what already exists.
I have turned off most notifications on my phone. Not because I'm difficult. Not because I'm antisocial. But because I understood something that most people are still figuring out: every app I add to my phone is a potential interruption. And interruptions are far more expensive than they appear.
It is not just the thirty seconds you spend looking at a notification. It is the context switch. The broken attention. The mental residue of whatever you just read, sitting in the background while you're trying to do something that actually matters. Research on this is consistent — recovering full focus after an interruption takes much longer than the interruption itself. You are not just losing the seconds you spent reading the notification. You are losing the minutes of deep work that follow.
And the more apps you use, the more time you spend switching between them. Every switch has a cost. That cost is invisible in the moment. It only becomes visible when you add it up across a week, a month, a year — and realize you have burned an enormous amount of time and cognitive energy just managing the tools that were supposed to make your life simpler.
Apps do not make your life easier. They make you more dependent on your phone. And phone dependency is not free. It costs attention. It costs focus. It costs the ability to be fully present — in a conversation, at a meal, on a walk — because somewhere on your home screen, seventeen things are waiting for you. I want to be direct here: a simple email would solve most of what these apps claim to solve. Email is not glamorous. Nobody gets excited about email in a product meeting. Companies do not make money selling email. But it works. It already lives on everyone's device. It does not require a new account, a new password, a new set of permissions, or a new icon to manage. The reason we reach for apps instead of email is not because apps are better. It is because apps look like we're doing something, and email looks like we're not.
Let me put the cost of this in concrete terms, because I think we have normalized something worth examining.
When an organization builds an app — even a wrapper, even a glorified bookmark — and asks you to use it, here is what they are actually asking:
Install software on your personal device. Grant us permission to send you notifications at any time. Grant access to your location, your camera, sometimes your contacts — often for reasons nobody bothered to explain. Give up storage on a device you paid for. Accept updates you did not choose, on a schedule you did not set. And change your behavior to fit our system.
In exchange for all of that, you get access to content your browser could already have shown you.
That is the actual deal. Most users accept it without reading anything. Most organizations offer it without questioning whether it is reasonable. And the companies in the middle make money every time that deal closes.
Nobody in the transaction asks the most important question: who is actually being served here?
So here is what I want to leave you with.
If you are an organization considering an app: stop. Before you talk to a vendor, before you look at pricing, before you get excited about your branded presence in the app store — ask the question that should have come first. What specific problem does this solve for my users that a well-built mobile website does not solve? If you cannot answer that clearly and specifically, you do not need an app. You need clearer thinking.
If you are a user being handed yet another app to install: stop. Before you tap install, ask yourself — do I actually need this on my phone? Is there a web version? Could a bookmark do the same job? What am I handing over, and why? If you cannot answer those questions, you are not making a choice. You are just complying.
App proliferation is not a technology problem. It is a thinking problem. Organizations stopped asking whether an app genuinely serves their users and started asking whether having an app makes them look current. Users stopped asking whether an app solves a real problem and started treating installation as a form of participation. Both sides got lazy. Both sides stopped thinking before acting.
Most apps are not innovation. They are overhead wearing the costume of convenience. They serve the ego of the decision-maker who gets to say "we have an app." They serve the vendor who gets paid to build it. And they serve the idea of modernity — not the person who has to live with the result. An app does not make you modern. An app does not make you helpful. Thinking does.
Think before you act. And see you next week.
