Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Hello and welcome back to App Stories. Today's episode is sponsored by P, the hydration app. My name is John Voorhees. With me is Federico Vittici, our editor-in-chief at MacStories.net. Federico, what's up? So fancy. Hello. Hi. I know. I know. I like to give you a title once in a while. Remind the people of your position of import. Yes. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate it.
I appreciate it coming from the managing editor of Mac Stories. Thank you. That would be me. That would be me. Very officious. Very officious. Well, Federico, we have a fun topic today. We also have a post show to remind people that we are now doing post shows for App Stories Plus subscribers, which you can join by going to appstories.plus or becoming a Club Premier member by going to plus.club.
After we get through this topic, I have a topic that I'm just dying to talk to you about, which we're going to talk a little bit about the 16E. Who doesn't want to stick around longer for more app stories, right? I have so many feels about the 16E. I know some people find this a boring phone. I do not. But for our main topic today, we are going to talk about...
Five for five, which for to me, I named it five for five. This is your idea. This is your. It is. It is. We're going to talk about five app trends for the next five years.
What do we see coming down the road? And I think we've done, you know, we've done episodes kind of like this before, but I think things have been evolving rapidly, especially in an era with AI. So I think it's time to refresh these ideas and talk a little bit about what we see coming down the pike these days. Okay. I'm guessing we're going to round robin this. We are. We have some...
We have to pay attention to the list because we have some overlap, I think, and some complementary ones here where we should probably reorder them a little bit. But yes, I think we should talk about these and round-robin them. Okay. Do you want me to go first?
Yes, you can start. Okay, so my first trend in the 545 is that I think for the foreseeable future, in the next couple of years and beyond, possibly, the large language model chatbots will continue to
But I think the model selectors, so the interface that sort of forces you to pick a model in a chatbot, I think those will largely go away and they will be unified in a simpler interface. And I'm thinking this because I feel like more and more companies...
I think this will actually happen in the very near future and potentially cloud by Anthropic will be the first one. I think more and more companies will move to a quote unquote hybrid model where the chatbot that you're having a conversation with will be able to understand on its own whether it's supposed to give you a quick short answer. So the traditional like imagine chat GPT for all behavior and
whether it's supposed to do a web search to find more data on the internet, or whether it's supposed to think and behave like a reasoning model. I feel like if you look at the landscape of chatbots today,
Claude, to a lesser extent. Primarily, ChugGPT and Gemini are the worst offenders here. They have these wild drop-downs where you click a menu and you're supposed to choose from these names like Gemini 1.5, 2.0 Flash, 2.0 Flash Experimental, 2.0 Flash Experimental with apps, or you go to ChugGPT and you see...
01, 01 Pro, 03 Mini, 03 Mini High, and then Deep Research, and 4.0. First of all, all of these names are bad, and AI companies should feel bad for using them. They mean absolutely nothing. I think this rumor...
that we've seen over the past week. And maybe by the time this episode comes out, it'll actually be not a rumor anymore. But as we are recording these on Thursday, it's still a rumor that Claude is going to be the first to have this hybrid approach where the model will know whether it's supposed to think quickly or think longer, perform a web search or not. I think that is the user-friendly approach.
that more companies should follow. I think whenever Apple comes out with a large language model, with a Siri that you can actually have a persistent conversation with, I think that's very likely the Apple approach. Like don't let the user pick between these nonsensical names. Just do what's best for me, given my request.
Yeah, I think that that's absolutely going to happen. And I think it's the thing that makes the most sense myself because I would much rather have the model take a stab at what I want and get it wrong and have me have to clarify it than to go through that dropdown menu and figure out, well, does this have a web angle to it? Is this something that I want a long report for? Is this just a quick answer? I'd rather not think about that up front. I'd rather just ask my question, hit enter and see what I get.
And if I have to go back and ask for more. And then the companies will be incentivized to get it right because, you know, there's a lot of compute power that goes into these answers. And if you have to ask two or three times, that's going to cost them even more money. So my first pick is kind of related to that in that I think that AI is largely going to disappear into our apps. Right now,
You know, it's a marketing thing. Everybody wants you to know that everything has a built into it. Even your barbecue grill that I saw as CES, you know, got got a built into it. And at some point, everything will have a into it in the same way that everything has APIs built into it. You don't see very often an app
touting the fact that it's using the Tracked FM API. I mean, yes, for some of us nerds, we would want to know whether something's using Tracked or whether it's using, I don't know, IMDB or whatever it happens to be for an app. You know, what kind of backend are they using to find data for our tracking apps? But for the most part, that's not really true. And I don't think that's true for anybody who's kind of a normal user in the sense that... Are you saying that AI is a feature, not a product?
I am. I am. And it's going to be just like that. It's going to be just like calling an API. And there will be things that your apps will be capable of that will be AI-driven. And you really won't care whether they're AI-driven or whether they're calling out to a more traditional API or doing something algorithmically. It's just going to disappear into the background. And I think that that is...
Good for users, maybe not so great for AI companies because if it's a feature and not a product, I don't know, but I think it will disappear into the background. - Interesting, interesting.
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My number two is the fact that App Intents, so we're moving back to Apple platforms, App Intents will continue to be this key integration point for developers on Apple platforms because Apple is going to rely on them more and more as they move into AI and as they move into more home devices.
So my thinking is that, first of all, we still have to see that previously teased Siri functionality with the assistant being able to perform multiple actions in apps that was showcased at WWDC last year. Still nowhere to be found as of February 20th when we are recording this. But I think...
And I've always thought that is Apple's advantage. They have an ecosystem of millions of apps, and those apps can plug into different parts of the phones and the computers that we use on a daily basis. And they're turning features from those apps. This is very much a topic that has to be one of the all-time topics on App Stories. Apps turning from silos into platforms.
These sort of like trees that have branches and those branches are widgets, extensions, Siri, Intents, like all these different things. So the apps become in these little modules, right? And I think Apple will leverage that aspect of the platform that they have, the ecosystem that they have. I think we're going to see.
with apps in the iOS 18 version of Siri. And I think maybe in 2026 in the iOS 19 version of Siri. So imagine a Siri chat or whatever they're going to call it that is kind of reminiscent of Gemini in that you can have a conversation with the assistant, but you can also invoke your favorite third-party apps. And I can imagine Apple doing that in a more native and privacy-conscious way.
At the same time, I think if Apple is serious about the home market,
and if they're going to do a HomePod with a screen, for example, I think they will absolutely leverage intents, possibly with apps running on your phone, and have those commands be something that is supported on the device with the screen, but those are all based on the same technology that is powering widgets, that is powering control center, that is powering integration with Siri and AI. I think Apple will only continue down this path
of asking developers to build out App Intents and using those App Intents in a wide variety of ways. Yeah, I think you're right. And for my second pick here, it's very similar in that I think that App Intents is the new frontier. It's the new frontier for lock-in by Apple.
Apple. I think that this is going to be the way, right? It's really the new app store when you think about it, because this is the layer on top that makes it make sense for people to stay in the Apple ecosystem and continue to use Apple hardware. What I think is going to be the
the counterbalance to this and the thing that's going to create some tension is that I think that this is a little different than what we've seen in the past with apps and how they're becoming more atomic units. And that I think it's also commoditizing features in a way that is separating them so much from the underlying apps potentially
that developers might be hesitant to go down this path. I think that's going to be more true with larger developers, you know, the metas of the world, the Googles of the world, getting into app intents as opposed to indie app developers. But you're really...
Apple is really asking developers to build features for its system, almost build its own OS themselves as opposed to Apple building those pieces. It's just, to me, fundamentally a little different than a widget where you've actually still got some UI that's designed by the developer and that sort of thing. But, you know, we'll see. We'll see how it goes. I think in large part you are right about that. And I do think it is going to be the new frontier for lock-in. All right.
My third one is a fun one. So my third prediction is that the lines will blur between size classes for apps. Because I think as Apple gets into foldables or larger iPads,
or hybrid Macs that maybe have a foldable display or a touch display. I think what we are thinking today as, oh, this is an iPhone app, this is an iPad app, I think those lines will get blurrier and blurrier over time. And I think I want to keep an eye on this because it'll be fascinating to see if Apple follows the approach that we have seen on Android. What I think Google is doing some, I don't know if they're the right,
decisions but they're interesting regardless for example with android 16 uh starting next year they will enforce the full screen layout so if you're if you have a phone app and you run it on a foldable it'll default to going full screen but also right now on their foldables uh with with stock android what they do is they either like if an app doesn't have specific foldable layouts
You can choose in settings. You can say, oh, do I want to run this? Do I want to force it to pull screen? Do I want to run this in iPhone layout mode on one side of the open display? Do I want to run it in 3x2 aspect ratio? Like you have these settings. And so I have to imagine that as Apple gets into foldables, most likely in 2026 to 2027 with a foldable iPhone,
Regardless of whether they do a foldable iPhone in the style of a flip phone or in the style of a mini tablet that opens up book style, I think those size classes as we know them, they will change. And so at that point...
We're going to have a conversation about what is exactly an iPhone size class and what is an iPad size class, especially for universal apps. I basically think that things will become a lot more fluid because these devices are going to be more fluid, are going to have both iPhone layouts and larger layouts. And this...
This more, this rigid structure that we have today for size classes on Apple platforms, it's going to have to change. Yeah, you're probably right. It's interesting to me with foldables because you're more likely to have kind of a square aspect ratio with a foldable. And that's something that we've never seen on Apple devices. Unless it's a trifold. Have you seen the trifolds? Yes, I have. Those are wild questions.
Huawei S1, and I think the rumor is that Samsung is going to have a tri-fold as well. The idea being that you have this very thin panel that folds in three. So it can be a phone, but it also opens up and it's a rectangle instead of a square because you have basically two hinges instead of one. Interesting. We'll see.
All right. Well, my third pick is that Apple is ultimately going to lose its grip over the App Store. And it's going to be a lot more like the Mac App Store. Yeah. This was also, this was my final pick. So, yeah. Okay. Yeah. We're going to have, we're going to have...
you know, the ability to sideload. We're going to have alternate app stores, all that stuff. And I think that this is not, you know, part of this will come through regulation. But I think what we're at, I think Apple's already looking down the road, which is what my last pick was, which is app intents are going to be the new app store. That's going to be the new way that Apple keeps customers in their ecosystem instead of,
relying on the app store itself. There will still be some of that, I suppose, for a long time. It's going to be a slow process transitioning away from this, but I do think that the days are numbered for the kind of, you know, walled garden of the app store that we had in the past.
Yeah, I think you're right. And I think it's going to be interesting to see exactly what they do. Are they going to do the EU style marketplaces in the US? Are they just going to give up and say, fine, we're going to do Gatekeeper on iOS? And I really don't know. I really don't know what Apple prefers here.
I think ideally they would prefer nothing, right? They would prefer to just say, we're going to continue with the App Store. I think... I could see it being a hybrid approach too, because I think there are companies like
Microsoft where I think Apple could partner to bring things like Game Pass onto the iPhone in a way that both benefits Apple and Microsoft. I think Apple's been holding out for 30% on every single game on the platform, but I think that there are deals that could be struck that would make iOS a better gaming platform if Microsoft was on board with that, for instance. And I think more broadly speaking here, like if you extend this prediction
I think if we start from the assumption that one of Apple's greatest strengths, in addition to hardware, is the developer community, is the developer ecosystem.
I think as the developer sentiment toward Apple is increasingly changing, and I mean, just look at the Six Colors report card, for example, as an example of a downward facing trend over the past few years. As that developer sentiment is changing, I think Apple is going to have to do a series of things.
to buck that trend and to have that developer sentiment go up again, right? And this is unrelated to apps, but one of the things I was thinking about just a couple of days ago is, maybe not this year, although I wouldn't be surprised, but I think at some point, because of this, WWDC is going to have to return to a traditional format, to a traditional in-person conference format. Because WWDC,
Maybe like, what's the expression? Correlation is not causation? Something like that? Right, right. But I think there's an interesting parallel between the developer sentiment changing and not having that developer conference, that week-long event,
that sort of rejuvenates people and encourages developers to create for Apple platforms and to have those connections with Apple engineers, with Apple employees and the third-party developer community. I think... Yeah, it's Apple's chance to sell the developers on Apple itself. And I think they're losing out there for sure. So yeah, and I think that's unrelated to apps, but I think one of the other things they could do, as you mentioned, like...
Losing the grip on the App Store, having lower commissions, having more APIs that developers can use, and therefore new ways for developers to make money. I think we're going to have to see some changes, especially if Apple doesn't want to repeat what happened with the Vision Pro and the Vision OS App Store, where after the initial wave... And sure, the Vision Pro has other problems, including price, but...
Do we expect Apple to release new platforms over the next five years? I think we do. Do they want to have a third-party developer story on those platforms? I think they want to. And I think Apple needs to do something to make those developers happy again, essentially. Yeah, agreed, agreed.
You stole my final prediction, but I still have one. And this one is going to upset a bunch of people. And I'm sorry, but it's a thought that I have. I think. Oh, yeah. This is similar to one of my last ones too, but go ahead. I think the artisanal, well-crafted app interfaces will matter less and less.
over the next few years, because most people's interaction with apps will happen via widgets, via LLMs, via assistants, via miniaturized UIs projected on glasses or on their watches. I basically think that the era...
To an extent, this is already happening with SwiftUI. We talked about this a bunch over the past few years, like the grand normalization and standardization of app UIs, right? That's already been happening. And I think it'll continue to happen more and more as our interaction with apps
happen in the sort of environment where you're not looking at a full screen, painstakingly crafted interface. You're looking at a little module. You're looking at a sentence. You're looking at a watch or you're talking via AirPods. So sorry, designers, but there's going to be other
Areas where you can design, right? Language and how an interface is presented inside a widget. But I think the days of, oh, you tap on this icon on your home screen and you see this beautiful custom full screen UI, those days have been gone for a while. And I think that they will stay gone.
Yeah, they're not coming back. And that's related to one of my last ones, which is I think that the dominance of web apps over native apps is only going to continue. Oh, that's a hot take. I like it. I like it. We have seen that growing on the Mac for a long time now. I wrote about it recently for Club Mac Stories Weekly. And I think we're going to see more and more of it on...
on mobile too. You know, there's an awful lot of apps that we use now that there are elements of native UI in them, but a lot of them are thin wrappers on mobile too for web technologies that are cross-platform. And I just don't think that that trend is going to change. I think it's here to stay in part because it was already the trend. But I think with AI and the
the rise of agents and agents being able to do more things on web platforms because they are not locked down in the way that other APIs are to an OS, that we're going to see that trend continue with more and more apps available via the web and AI, you know, kind of tuning into those and working with them through agents. So that's... What I would do...
To be able to skip ahead two years to Apple in 2027, to see Apple that has mostly caught up in AI, that maybe has a foldable, that maybe has a touch Mac or maybe a larger iPad or whatever it is. Because like, I feel like we're now, we're now in this weird limbo with Apple stuff where the hardware is pretty much,
static, setting aside the Vision Pro, which you look at the Vision Pro in a vacuum, it's this exquisite piece of hardware, really innovative hardware. It's like a piece of art, really, technological art. It's a marvel. From a hardware engineering standpoint, it's a marvel. But if you look at everything else, the AirPods, the iPhones, the Macs,
Everything has been mostly an iteration over the past few years. And we are now in this moment in time where we know that Apple is working on this next generation of software and hardware. So whether it's AirPods with cameras or glasses or foldables, and in software, they're working on a whole bunch of AI features and maybe app intents and all that kind of stuff.
But now we're here and we're stuck here. And so we have the iPhones that have been mostly the same for the past few years. The AirPods and the Apple watches that have been mostly the same for the past few years, they're getting thinner, sure. And they're more powerful, sure. But they're the same. And so what I would do to skip ahead just two years, just two years in the future to see what it's like. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I agree. You know what, Federico? It's funny too. My very last pick was,
is something that you and I were talking about right before we started recording, which is that as the app store's dominance fades, I think you're going to find that consumers are increasingly turning to non-Apple hardware because they're using web apps, they're using AI, they're using things that work across platforms, and it's going to open up the world of Android and other operating systems and hardware to people in a way that we have not seen over the last decade.
10, 15 years. Now, you know, our conversation about app intents is maybe the counterbalance to that in a lot of ways for Apple potentially. But,
But I do think that you're going to see people, especially in a world where I think gadgets are back. I think gadgets and weird takes on the laptop and wearables and everything are really having a resurgence. And it's not a coincidence. It's because of the web. It's because of AI. It's because of a lot of things.
that I think a lot of people are going to dip their toe into if they're curious about what else is out there. And I think, and I would add to that, I absolutely agree, and I'm going to add to that, that if you pay attention to what Apple has been doing, that I think they've also been sort of hedging against that future themselves. Because I think if you pay attention, there's this
Small fire under the surface where Apple has been... I don't think it's a coincidence that Apple has been doing a great job bringing iCloud to Windows, bringing Apple passwords to Windows, bringing Apple TV and Apple Music to Windows and Android. I think... And this may be an article that will work at some point in the future. But I think...
If you think about it, there's never been a better time to be an Apple user on other platforms, which is kind of a weird take, but it's also kind of true. It is, but it's partly because of the services side of the business that's really taken off for Apple, right? I mean, that's a big part of it. That's why it's in Apple's interest to kind of expand beyond the bounds of its own OSs at this point. Yeah, because like...
The whole narrative was Apple is turning into a services company because there's recurring money to be made off of subscriptions, which is absolutely true. But it's also a way to say, well,
If we're back in this gadget era and people are buying weird PCs or they're buying Android handles or they're buying Android foldables, how do we make sure that you can stay an Apple user
on other platforms. And it requires this fundamental rethinking of what it means to be an Apple user. Are you an Apple user only if you buy an iPhone or only if you buy an Apple Watch? Or can you be an Apple user as part of a bigger ecosystem, as part of a more diverse ecosystem? And I think there's something to that idea. And it's something that I want to explore over the next few months because I think there's more to the idea of diversifying
being locked into Apple platforms than just saying, oh, it means I have to buy an iPhone. It means I have to buy a Mac, an iPad and an Apple TV.
Right, right. No, absolutely. Absolutely. Well, Federico, it's a great conversation. I think we have a lot of interesting stuff to look forward to in the next five years, I think. But speaking of that, in the post-show, we're going to talk about another iPhone that maybe, and I don't know the answer, that maybe you want or don't want to buy any longer, which is the iPhone 16E. So we're going to talk about that right after this segment that John is going to take us home for this episode.
Absolutely. Absolutely. As usual, you can always find us at MacStories.net. I want to thank our sponsor for this episode. That's P, the hydration app. And of course, you can find us on social media where Federico is at Fatici. It's V-I-T-I-C-C-I. And I'm at John Voorhees. J-O-H-N-V-O-O-R-H-W-S. Talk to you next week, Federico. Ciao, John.