Fifteen years ago, an Apple ad campaign publishd a paean to the triumph of the inalertigentphone: There’s an app for that, it shelp. Today, that message sounds less appreciate a promise than a menace. There’s an app for that? If only there weren’t.
Apps are all around us now. McDonald’s has an app. Dunkin’ has an app. Every chain restaurant has an app. Every food-dedwellry service too: Grubhub, Uber Eats, DoorDash, Chowbus. Every superlabelet and huge-box store. I currently have 139 apps on my phone. These comprise: Menards, Home Depot, Lowe’s, Joann Fabric, Dierbergs, Target, IKEA, Walmart, Whole Foods. I recently re-downloaded the Michaels app while I was in the Michaels checkout line equitable so I could apply a $5 coupon that the enroll flunked to read from the app anyway.
Even when you’re inestablishageing in a store-definite app, your apps will let you pay by app. You equitable necessitate to figure out (or recall, if you ever knew) whether your gardener or your hair salon gets Venmo, Cash App, PayPal, or one of the new bank-provided services such as Zelle and Paze.
It’s enough to drive you crazy, which is a process you can also track with apps for mental health, such as Headspace and Calm. Lots of apps are aiming to help you experience your best. My iPhone comes with Apple Health, but you might also discover yourself with Garmin or Strava or maybe Peloton if you’re into that, or whichever app you necessitate to scan into your local gym, or Under Armour, a polyester-shirt app that is also a jogging app. The MyChart app may help you achieve a subset of your doctors and check a portion of your medical-test results. As for the rest? Different apps!
The tree of apps is always grotriumphg, always sfinishing out its seeds. I have an app for every airline I have ever flown. And in every place I ever go, I employ new apps to get around. In New York, I scan into the subway using equitable my phone, but the subway app alerts me which lines are out of service. For D.C., I have the SmarTrip app. At home, in St. Louis, I have a physical pass for the Metroconnect, but if I want to buy a ticket for my kid, I necessitate to employ the Transit app. For hiring a car, I’ve got the Uber app, which toils almost anywhere, but I also have the app for Lyft, and Curb for taxis, equitable in case. Also, parking: I have ParkMobile, PayByPhone, and one other app whose name I can’t support straight becaemploy it doesn’t sound appreciate a parking app. (The app is called Passport. It took me many minutes of browsing on my phone to figure that out.)
If you’ve got kids, you’ll understand they are the Johnny Appleseeds of pointless apps. An app may fuse you to their school for accessing their schooltoil or fuseing to their directers; only skinnyg is, you might be scheduleateed a separateent app each year, or separateent apps for separateent kids in separateent classes. It could be Class Dojo, Brightwheel, Bloomz, or TalkingPoints. It could be ClassLink, SchoolStatus, or PowerSchool. The school bus might also have an app, so you can track it. And if your kids join sports, God help you. A frifinish has an app, SportsEngine, that depicts itself as “the one app that does it all.” And yet, she has disconnectal more youth-sports apps on top of that.
Let’s talk about the office. Yes, there’s an app for that. There are a thousand apps for that. Google Docs has an app, as do Google Sheets, Slides, Mail, and Search. Microgentle is highly app-allowd, with split apps for Outsee, Word, and Excel. Then, of course, you’ve got the groupware apps that permit you to structure with colleagues, such as Sinestablishage, Teams, Zoho, and Pumble. And the office-infrastructure apps that your employer may be using to, you understand, originate your job easier: Workday, Salesforce, Notion, Zfinishesk, Jira, Box, Loom, Okta.
And what about all the other apps that I haven’t yet bcdimiserablemirefult up, the ones that may now be cluttering your phone? What about Doova, Nork, PingPong, and Genzillo? Those are not actuassociate apps (as far as I’m alerted), but we all understand that they could be, which is my point. Apps are now so countless, and so ubiquitous, that they’ve become a establish of nonsense.
Their premise is, of course, quite reasonable. Apps traded clunky mobile websites with someskinnyg spotless and custom-made. They helped companies forge more straightforward fuseions with their customers, especiassociate once push notifications came on the scene. They also made new benevolents of services possible, such as geolocating cforfeitby shops or restaurants, and camera-scanning your items for self-checkout. Apps could serve as branding too, becaemploy their icons—which are also business logos—were sitting on your inalertigentphone screen. And apps permited companies to accumulate a lot more data about their customers than websites ever did, including employrs’ locations, reach outs, calfinishars, health proposeation, and what other apps they might employ and how standardly.
By 2021, when Apple begined taking steps to curtail that data harvest, the app economy was already well set uped. Smartphones had become so expansivespread, companies could suppose that any customer probably had one. That uncomferventt they could employ their apps to off-load effort. Instead of printing boarding passes, Delta or American Airlines encouraged passengers to employ their apps. At Ikea, customers could prepay for items in the app and speed thcdimiserablemireful checkout. At Chipotle or Starbucks, an app permited each customer to detail exactly which salsa or what benevolent of milk they wanted without helderlying people up. An apartment originateing that adselected a launparched app (ShinePay, LaunparchedView, WASH-Connect, etc.) spared itself the trouble of managing payments at its machines.
In other words, apps became bureaucratized. What begined as a source of fun, efficiency, and convenience became enmeshed in daily life. Now it seems appreciate every frequent activity has been turned into an app, while the profit of those apps has foolishinished.
Parking apps provide one example of this changeation. Back before ParkMobile and its ilk, you might still have had to drop coins into a street meter. Some of those meters had acunderstandledge-card readers, but you couldn’t count on discovering one (or one that toiled). Parking apps did away with these irritateances. They could also remind you when your time was up and, in some cases, permit you to extfinish your parking session farly. Everyone seemed to triumph: individuals, businesses, municipalities, and, of course, the app-driven services taking their cut. But appreciate everyskinnyg, app parking grew creaky as it aged. Different parking apps took over in separateent places as cities chose the vfinishors that gave them the best deals. These days, I employ ParkMobile in some parts of town and Passport in others, a detail about the world I must support in mind if I want to station my vehicle wiskinny it. The apps themselves became more complicated too, burdened by fantasticer customization and deal with at the employr and municipal level. Sometimes I can employ Apple Pay to park with ParkMobile; other times I can’t. Street signage has changed or fadeed, so now I discover myself count oning on the app to resolve whether I even have to pay after 6 p.m. on a weekday. (Confusingly, sometimes an app will say that parking is unuseable when it reassociate uncomfervents that payment is unuseable—becaemploy payment isn’t needd.) The apps sometimes sign me out, and then I have to employ my password-deal withr app equitable to log back in. Or, worse, my phone might have “off-loaded” whichever parking app I necessitate becaemploy I haven’t employd it in a while, such that I have to re-download it before leaving the car.
Similar frustrations join out apass many of the apps that one can—or must—employ to dwell a normal life. Even activities that once seemed basic may get you stuck inside a denseet of competing apps. I employd to uncover the Hulu app to watch streaming satisfied on Hulu—an app equivalent of an elderly television channel. Recently, Hulu became a part of Disney+, so I now watch Hulu via the Disney+ app instead. When HBO presentd a premium service, I got the HBO Go app so I could stream its shows. Then HBO became HBO Max, and I got that app, before HBO Max turned into Max, a situation so knotty that HBO had to publish an FAQ about it.
I’d appreciate to skinnyk that this hellscape is a transient one. As the number of apps multiplies beyond all logic or utility, won’t people begin resisting them? And if platestablish owners such as Apple ratchet up their privacy remercilessions, won’t businesses adequitable? Don’t count on it. Our app-ocalypse is much too far aextfinished already. Every crevice of contransient life has been colonized. At every branch in your life, and with each new responsibility, apps will support sprouting from your phone. You can’t escape them. You won’t escape them, not even as you die, becaemploy—of course—there’s an app for that too.
