The Smartphone Is the Super App We Don’t Need
There was an ongoing trend in the software world toward bundling multiple -- even unrelated -- features into a single application. These are the so-called “super apps,” and they still exist today. As The Verge put it in 2021:
Say you want to see Japanese Breakfast play in Sacramento next week with a couple of friends. The process of going requires jumping between at least a few apps — you might coordinate plans on WhatsApp, buy your tickets from Ticketmaster, book a ride through Uber, and pay each other back for drinks over Venmo.
But what if all that activity happened in one app on your phone?
On the surface, it might seem convenient. One app for everything -- what’s bad about that? But the more you think about it, the worse it gets. This trend undermines variety, weakens competition, and erodes the quality of user experience. Instead of picking the best tool for each task, you’re stuck with one bloated platform that does many things poorly. Every feature screams for your attention the moment you open the app, and more often than not you forget why you launched it in the first place.
For autocratic, surveillance-driven states like China (WeChat) and Russia (VK), these super apps are a dream come true. By concentrating so much of everyday life inside a single platform, they make it trivial to track, profile, and control citizens. Payments, shopping, communication, social connections, even movement -- all of it becomes visible and controllable to the state in one neat package with a polished design on top.
But surveillance isn’t the focus of this post -- personal experience is. I’d go even further and say that feature bloat is a stage in the broader enshittification process. The apps we once loved gradually turn into jacks of all trades and masters of none. The more features get crammed in, the less time, care, and attention each one receives. What once felt simple and delightful now feels heavy, confusing, and designed to trap you rather than serve you.
And this brings me to the modern smartphone.
When Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone in 2007, he famously described it as a three-in-one device: an iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator. He was right, it was all three, and it was revolutionary.
Now, almost 20 years later, the iPhone has become far more than that, thanks to the endless variety of apps. It’s a pro camera, a fitness tracker, a banking tool, a navigation system, a gaming console, a shopping mall, and a social hub -- all squeezed onto a single screen. And yet, that’s precisely the problem.
Every app now feels like another unnecessary feature screaming for your attention. Notifications, badges, and pop-ups compete to pull you away from whatever you actually meant to do. Your smartphone has become the ultimate super app: bloated, overwhelming, and distracting. With so many things you could do on your iPhone, you end up doing none.
And it feels like a new trend is forming. People are switching to minimal black-and-white setups on their phones, or even buying dedicated minimalist devices altogether. Others are putting their iPhones aside in favour of actual cameras, tired of the heavy-handed post-processing in modern smartphones. More and more people are also turning to dedicated e-ink devices for distraction-free reading.
Personally, I find myself missing my iPod. It was a fantastic single-purpose device, now reduced to just another app. Sure, the iTunes part of the iPod experience wasn’t ideal, but look where we’ve ended up: Apple Music isn’t any better, and the iPod itself is gone. Instead of 1,000 songs, we now carry 1,000 features in our pocket -- and most of them just get in the way.
...the company has, in the pursuit of easy profits, constrained the space in which it innovates.That didn’t matter for a long time: smartphones were the center of innovation, and Apple was consequently the center of the tech universe. Now, however, Apple is increasingly on the periphery, and I think that, more than anything, is what bums people out: no, Apple may not be a sugar water purveyor, but they are farther than they have been in years from changing the world.