App Myopia

Scott Jensen over a frog design talks our current obsession with seeing every possible solution in the mobile space as an app, he calls it app myopia:

Default Thinking comes up frequently when discussing technology, but a particularly virulent form of it has taken hold in mobile: App Myopia. This is a paradigm that sees every possible mobile opportunity only as an exercise in creating an app. This is a rather useful myopia, to be sure, as some people are making lots of money selling apps, but it is beginning to feel like a local maximum and a paradigm that can only get us so far. As Thomas Kuhn might say, we are in need of a revolution.

Scott has a great point. Sure it’s wonderful if everyone is using an iPhone, because that means they can all talk to each other because they share a common platform, but we don’t live in that kind of world. There’s many different phones with different operating systems, and in the ideal world they would all be able to talk to each other and their surroundings.

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