The iPhone got a big revamp with iOS10 - and it might tell us a lot about where mobile apps are headed.
After much speculation and anticipation, iOS 10 is finally here. It features a redesigned lock screen complete with at-a-glance widgets, better integration for some of Apple’s core apps, and a revamped Clock with a dark interface so you can finally stop blinding yourself every time you want to set your alarm for the night. But without a doubt, the most anticipated and significant changes came in the stock Messages app.
Messages, long-neglected in comparison to other messaging apps like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, got a major upgrade in iOS 10. Messages now allows users to quickly and easily send finger-drawn doodles, full-screen effects around message bubbles, and rich content like GIFs, songs, and videos. But the biggest change comes in the form of a new, dedicated app store housed right within the Messages application, complete with a host of apps built specifically to integrate with Messages. While all of the new features make messaging a more engaging experience, it’s the last that points the way to the future of the mobile app industry.
The First Step Towards a New App Order
Open up the new Messages app, click on the “A” icon, and you’ll find yourself in the familiar interface of Apple’s expansive App Store – but this time, there’s a twist. The apps in this store are designed specifically for Messages: they’re housed within Messages and run from inside the app instead of existing as a new standalone app on your phone. The apps you’ll find here include sticker packs, new integrations from familiar apps like Yelp, and brand new apps designed only for Messages. This means you’ll be able to do things with Messages you’d never thought possible, and with this new update, Apple has opened up a brand new playing field for the app industry.
At Neon Roots, one of our developers sees the Messages app revamp as a signal for more to come. “It’s really exciting,” says Franky Aguilar, who also founded 99centbrains, a development shop that has garnered more than 10 million downloads across its portfolio of apps and recently had its app Pugly featured as a top sticker app for Messages. “I’m most excited about games. Think about the Facebook days where you would spam your friends to help ‘water your plants’ - now you can basically message a friend to help you, and they receive an engaging, deeply interactive experience.”
Effectively, says Aguilar, Apple has turned Messages into a completely different app with a new purpose, one that goes beyond simple communication. “It’s going to open up a giant wave of new interaction,” and as the marketplace grows and matures, developers will be racing to come up with new apps for Messages – almost recreating the gold rush of the App Store’s first years.
Moving Away from Apps
Besides opening up a new playground for developers, the new Messages app store signals something deeply significant about where mobile apps are going. In effect, the “apps” coming from the Messages app store aren’t really stand alone apps - they’re add-ons that work within Messages, helping to advance the function of another, previously-existing app.
According to Aguilar, this is the way of the future.
“I think apps will start to fade out, and the market will move more towards extensions and plugins.” As Aguilar sees it, the future of apps is greater integration across a smaller number of apps with more powerful capabilities. “Instead of 50 different photo editors, you’ll have 50 different photo editing extensions that work within the photohosting apps.” In effect, the future of apps isn’t apps: it’s add-ons.
Take the photo editing app VCSO. While it currently exists as a standalone app, most of its users effectively use it as an “add-on” to the stock Photos app – they export photos to VCSO, edit them, then post them to Instagram or save them back to their camera roll.
But this process could be more efficient. What if, instead of existing as its own app, VCSO was simply a plugin to the stock Photos app? This would let users edit photos using VCSO straight from the Photos app, making the entire process simpler and more streamlined.
An App Store for Every App
Taking this process a step further, we may see the same thing that happened to Messages happening to other stock apps across the iPhone. While Messages is the first app to get its own app store, it may not be the last.
Apple may choose to replicate this model across other stock apps. In theory, apps like Notes, Calendar, Photos, Camera, Reminders, Maps, even Settings could all get their own app store, each one filled with extensions and plugins that enhance the capabilities of the app itself. If Apple chose to pursue this model, it would literally turn every stock app into its own marketplace and could even trigger a “second gold rush” in app development, with developers clamoring to create the “next hot extension” for a stock app.
For Apple, the incentive here is obvious: instead of just one app store to monetize, they could have multiple. Users would have fewer apps to deal with, but the apps they did use would be more powerful and robust. And for developers, it would reopen the “wild west” of the App Store: it would create a new frontier for development and innovation in every stock app on the iPhone.
Whether this possibility turns into a reality is yet to be seen, but there’s certainly nothing to stop Apple from doing it. In any case, it’s looking more and more like the future of mobile apps doesn’t lie in mobile apps, per se: it lies in increasingly specialized extensions, plugins, and add-ons that make existing apps more powerful and robust. The next Angry Birds won’t be a standalone app like Angry Birds - it’ll exist within the framework and environment of an existing app like Messages.