The Great Rewrite

Something interesting will happen once most of us have recreated the apps on our home screens: software will shift from a shared experience to a fully individual one, from being a tool to becoming a real medium.

Will this happen?

We already do it with everything else. We pick our furniture, desk lamps, notebook colors. Defaults exist, but nobody aspires to the default. The only reason software stayed generic this long is that we couldn’t change it effectively. Now we can.

Will everything change?

No. Just because you can build the entire house doesn’t mean you’ll want to. The boring, unglamorous, important things will likely remain untouched.

But the tools you think with every day — the ones you actually reach for? You’ll have very little tolerance for anything that doesn’t bend to your needs and likes.

Will it be lonely?

Everyone’s apps will be different, and the shared experience and struggle of using the same tool will fade. But something new takes its place: communities built around fresh ideas for improvement, inspiring workflows, and original perspectives. Instead of bonding over the same product, people will bond over what they’ve made of it.

When change is cheap and easy, users become creators.

Git-like change management is one way this might work. You can simply start fresh with a fork or a clone. But most of the time you’ll iterate, committing your own ideas, merging in someone else’s. Software as clay.

All of this is still hard. Especially for all the native apps on your home screen. There’s no easy way that lets personal apps evolve in these ways without requiring you to be a developer. A gap that seems worth building for right now.