If you opened your phone right now and counted the apps, you might find forty. Maybe eighty. Maybe two hundred.
Every one of them was a promise. Download me and your life gets easier. And every one of them came with the same fine print: first, learn everything about me.
We accepted this. We accepted that wanting to do something meant first finding the right rectangle on a grid, opening it, remembering how it works, and navigating to the part that does the thing. A different app for the flight. A different app for the bank. A different app for the food, the ride, the calendar, the doctor, the dry cleaner.
We naively called this convenience, but it was just a filing system for intentions.
The app was always a workaround
We honestly learned this the hard way.
Some of you might remember 0.email. It was an email client, and it was a really good one. But it became really clear that it is just a middleman between you and your goals. It became this monster we 1) couldn't tame, and 2) couldn't make an impact on the world with. Then we built orchid.ai, a different take on what an email client is. Also good, but in the end, just a middle man between you and your objectives. It was one more thing asking you to come to it, learn it, operate it. No matter how perfectly we nailed the UI, or how well thought out our experiences were, we had this feeling that something was still missing.
Looking back, it's clear that that feeling was that we never wanted another app.
Each time, we'd built another workaround and called it a product. The thing we kept making was the very thing people didn't want: a place to go, a tool to wield, a manual to memorize. It took us a while to see that we were solving the wrong problem. The problem was never that the apps were bad. It was that there was an app at all.
Well… what did we want? We wanted to book the flight. We wanted to handle the refunds. We wanted dinner at 8...
So what replaces it
Not a better app. Not a smarter grid. Not an app that finally, after all these years, has good search.
A conversation.
We already know how to do this. We've been doing it our whole lives. You tell a competent person what you want, and they handle it. You don't open them. You don't navigate them. You don't learn their interface. You just say the thing.
"Book me Aruba, soon."
"What was that restaurant we loved last March?"
"Remind me to take my meds at 9."
There's no screen to learn here because there's no screen. There's intent, and there's outcome, and nothing in between that you have to operate. The interface disappears, because the best interface was never an interface. It was someone who already understood you.
Why messages?
If the next app is no app, it has to live somewhere. And the somewhere is already on your phone, already open, already the most-used thing you touch all day.
Your messages.
Think about what the messaging thread actually is. It's the one place on your phone with no learning curve, because it's the purest form of human expression. It's where your real life already happens, the group chats, the plans, the people who matter. It's the app you check first in the morning and last at night, not because anyone gamified it, but because that's where the people are.
Now imagine an assistant there. Not as another icon to find. As another thread. The same place you text your partner, you text the thing that books the flight, tracks the calories, drafts the reply, catches the deadline before it slips. No new app to download. No new place to check. No new behavior to build.
And it's everywhere you are. Your phone, your watch, your laptop, the same thread following you across all of it. No context to rebuild. No tab to find. The assistant lives in the channel you never close.
The app asked you to come to it. The thread is already where you are.
The quiet part
This isn't a smaller version of the app era. It might be the end of it.
For thirty years the deal was: we give you capability, you give us your attention, one screen at a time. The app store was the field of that deal; discovery, downloads, icons, badges, with the express purpose of capturing your attention.
The next era doesn't have icons. It has a thread, and on the other end of it, something that does the work the app used to make you do.
You probably won't miss the apps. The same way few people miss the filing cabinet, or the phone book, or the travel agent's printout. You'll just notice, one day, that you've stopped opening things. That you started asking instead. That the gap between wanting and having got so small you can text it.
The next app is no app.
It's a message.
If your phone has started to feel like a grid of chores you have to operate yourself, we built Orchid for exactly this. One thread, in the messages you already use, that handles the rest. Say hi and let it run 🌸
