Malleable software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps (2025)

Environments matter. When we're in spaces that let us express our unique potential, we can do our best work and live our best lives. A guitar maker arranges their tools in a workshop, and a home cook assembles their knives, cutting boards, and pots. In the physical world, we naturally craft our environments through small tweaks or larger changes. We can even seek help from local craftspeople. Stewart Brand's book, How Buildings Learn, highlights how a building ages and becomes loved through adaptation to its occupants.

In the digital world, we spend more time in code-based environments. Collaborating across continents and searching through thousands of files have become possible. However, we're losing the ability to adapt and make these environments our own. For example, a software team once used index cards taped to a wall for tracking work, constantly evolving it as their process changed. When they switched to a web-based issue tracker, the team lost the ability to model special zones for their process.

Computerized work has led to a loss of agency. Doctors once skipped irrelevant fields in paper forms, but now software forces them to fill those fields, decreasing their power to edit the software rules. This can lead to burnout, as doctors spend extra time completing unnecessary fields. When software doesn't meet users' needs, they may try to give feedback, but developers usually can't act on it immediately.

Centralized development teams can't address everyone's problems, and overloading a single product with too many solutions results in a bloated mess.

To avoid this, good product teams learn to decline most user requests, leaving niche needs unserved. The shift of control to users who know their own needs could benefit productivity and make users feel more in control of their tools, as seen in a neurosurgeon's adaptation of their medical records system with an IT analyst. This story is more the exception than the rule, as software is currently organized into monolithic applications with little customization.

Customization typically requires programming skills and closed-source software. App stores are designed for companies distributing software to consumers, not amateurs sharing tools with their friends.

Mass-produced software offers many benefits, such as access to a vast array of polished applications at reasonable prices, improved reliability, accessibility, and security. However, inflexible software gets in the way for those who are different from the average user. As agency matters to everyone with specific needs, we envision a new computing ecosystem that gives users agency as co-creators, calling it malleable software.