Agents won't kill apps... on a phone, they can't act without them
At WWDC this year, in the keynote, Apple confirmed something I had been holding as a logical intuition more than as an open question: when the assistant that lives in your phone wants to do something for you, it goes into the apps installed on that phone. An app declares the actions it can perform, and that is what Siri calls. On Android, Google is building the same door under the name…
At the recent WWDC conference, Apple affirmed that the assistant residing within your phone communicates with installed applications rather than directly engaging with the apps themselves. Similarly, Google is developing a comparable feature called AppFunctions, which serves as the on-device alternative to agent calls over MCP. The development of apps appears to be reaching an end.
This report, authored by a co-founder of GoodBarber, a platform for constructing and distributing mobile apps, contends that apps are destined to survive. Carl Pei, CEO of Nothing, declared at SXSW that apps are set to vanish. The reasoning behind this assertion is compelling. An agent does not necessitate a screen to place an order for a pizza; it merely requires an endpoint.
If it can access your service via an API or a website, the intermediary app becomes an unnecessary step, and the company's true product becomes the surface its agents can interact with. While the author agrees with the notion of agents diminishing navigation, they differ in their opinion of where the agent should go when interacting with a phone.
Apple seems to agree, believing that all tasks performed by the assistant on a phone should pass through the installed apps.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
