Please don’t force me to download another app

Fifteen years ago, an Apple advertising campaign praised the triumph of the smartphone: There’s an app for thatit said. Today, that message sounds less like a promise and more like a threat. Is there an app for this? If only that didn’t exist.

Apps are now everywhere around us. McDonald’s has an app. Dunkin’ has an app. Every chain restaurant has an app. Also all food delivery services: Grubhub, Uber Eats, DoorDash, Chowbus. Every supermarket and wholesale market. I currently have 139 apps on my phone. These include: Menards, Home Depot, Lowe’s, Joann Fabric, Dierbergs, Target, IKEA, Walmart, Whole Foods. I recently re-downloaded the Michaels app while at the Michaels checkout just so I could redeem a $5 coupon that the cashier couldn’t read from the app anyway.

Even if you don’t have a business-specific app, you can use your apps to pay via app. All you have to do is figure out (or remember, if you ever knew) whether your gardener or hair salon uses Venmo, Cash App, PayPal, or one of the new banking services like Zelle and Paze.

It’s enough to drive you crazy, a process you can also track with mental health apps like Headspace and Calm. Many apps aim to help you feel your best. My iPhone has Apple Health installed, but you might also find yourself on Garmin or Strava, or maybe Peloton if you’re into that, or the app you need to scan into your local gym, or Under Armour, a polyester shirt app also a jogging app. MyChart app can help you reach some of your doctors and check some of your medical test results. As for the rest? Various apps!

The tree of apps is constantly growing and always sending out its seeds. I have an app for every airline I’ve ever flown with. And every place I go, I use new apps to get around. In New York, I just scan the subway with my phone, but the subway app tells me which lines are out of service. For DC I have the SmarTrip app. At home, in St. Louis, I have a physical Metrolink card, but if I want to buy a ticket for my child, I have to use the transit app. For renting a car, I have the Uber app, which works almost everywhere, but I also have the app for Lyft and Curb for taxis, just in case. Also, parking: I have ParkMobile, PayByPhone and another app that I can’t remember the name of because it doesn’t sound like a parking app. (The app is called Passport. I spent many minutes searching on my phone to figure this out.)

If you have kids, you know they are the Johnny Appleseeds of mindless apps. An app can connect you to their school to access their schoolwork or connect with their teachers. The only thing is, you might be assigned a different app every year, or different apps for different kids in different classes. It could be Class Dojo, Brightwheel, Bloomz or TalkingPoints. It could be ClassLink, SchoolStatus or PowerSchool. The school bus may also have an app you can use to track it. And if your kids play sports, God help you. A friend has an app, SportsEngine, that describes itself as “the only app that does it all.” And yet it also has a few other youth sports apps.

Let’s talk about the office. Yes, there is an app for that. There are thousands of apps for that. Google Docs has an app, as do Google Sheets, Slides, Mail and Search. Microsoft is highly app-enabled and has separate apps for Outlook, Word and Excel. Then of course there are the groupware apps that you can use to coordinate with colleagues, such as Slack, Teams, Zoho and Pumble. And the office infrastructure apps your employer may use to make your work easier: Workday, Salesforce, Notion, Zendesk, Jira, Box, Loom, Okta.

Read: The app that monetizes doing nothing

And what about all the other apps I haven’t touched on yet that may now be cluttering up your phone? What about Doova, Nork, PingPong and Genzillo? These aren’t actually apps (as far as I know), but we all know that could be, and that’s my point. Apps are now so numerous and ubiquitous that they have become a kind of nonsense.

Your premise is, of course, entirely reasonable. Apps replaced clunky mobile websites with something clean and tailored. They helped companies build more direct connections with their customers, especially when push notifications came onto the scene. They also enabled new types of services, such as: Such as geolocating nearby stores or restaurants and scanning your items with a camera for self-checkout. Apps could also serve as branding, as their icons – which are also company logos – could be seen on your smartphone screen. And apps allowed companies to collect far more data about their customers than websites ever did, including users’ locations, contacts, calendars, health information, and what other apps they might use and how often.

By the time Apple began taking measures to curb this data collection in 2021, the app economy was already well established. Smartphones were so common that companies could assume that every customer probably had one. This meant they could use their apps to provide relief. Instead of printing boarding passes, Delta and American Airlines encouraged their passengers to use their apps. At Ikea, customers were able to pay for items in advance in the app, making it quicker to check out. At Chipotle or Starbucks, an app allowed each customer to specify exactly what salsa or what type of milk they wanted without stopping people. An apartment building that adopted a laundry app (ShinePay, LaundryView, WASH-Connect, etc.) has saved itself the hassle of managing payments to its ATMs.

In other words, apps have become bureaucratized. What started as a source of fun, efficiency and convenience became an integral part of everyday life. Now it seems like every ordinary activity has been turned into an app, while the usefulness of these apps has diminished.

Parking apps are an example of this change. Before ParkMobile and the like, you might have had to insert coins into a street meter. Some of these meters had credit card readers, but you couldn’t expect to find one (or one that worked). Parking apps have eliminated these annoyances. They can also remind you when your parking time is up and, in some cases, allow you to extend your parking session remotely. Everyone seemed to win: individuals, businesses, communities and of course the app-driven services that had their share. But like everything, app parking became more creaky as it got older. Different parking apps took over in different places as cities chose the providers that gave them the best deals. These days I use ParkMobile in some parts of the city and Passport in others, a detail of the world that I have to keep an eye on if I want to base my vehicle in it. The apps themselves have also become more complex, with greater customization and control at the user and community level. Sometimes I can use Apple Pay to park with ParkMobile; Sometimes I can’t. Street signage has changed or disappeared, so I now rely on the app to determine if I even need to pay after 6pm on weekdays. (Confusingly, sometimes an app will report that there is no parking available when it actually means that payment is not available – because no payment is required.) The apps sometimes log me out and then I have to use my password manager app to log back in. Or, worse, my phone may have “unloaded” the parking lot. I need the app because I haven’t used it for a while and therefore need to download it again before leaving the car.

Similar frustrations arise with many apps that you can – or must – use to live a normal life. Even activities that once seemed easy can find you stuck in the thicket of competing apps. I used to open the Hulu app to watch streaming content on Hulu – an app equivalent of an old TV channel. Hulu recently became part of Disney+, so I now watch Hulu through the Disney+ app instead. When HBO launched a premium service, I got the HBO Go app so I could stream the shows. Then HBO became HBO Max, and I got that app before HBO Max became Max, a situation so tricky that HBO had to publish an FAQ about it.

I would like to believe that this hellscape is temporary. If the number of apps multiplies beyond all logic or usefulness, won’t people start resisting them? And if platform owners like Apple tighten their privacy restrictions, won’t companies adapt? Don’t rely on it. Our app ocalypse has already progressed far too far. Every crevice of modern life has been colonized. In every area of ​​your life and with every new responsibility, apps will continue to emerge on your phone. You can’t escape them. You won’t escape them, not even if you die, because of course there’s an app for that too.