When Intents Matter More Than Apps

In February, I wrote that the app model was collapsing, that the little grid of icons we've been swiping through since 2008 was dissolving into composable services orchestrated by AI through conversation. No grid. No swiping. In March, Nothing's CEO said the same thing from the hardware side. Commerce leaders were already there. The signal was triangulating from every direction, like fishermen reading the same shift in the wind from different environmental cues.

Apple, the company that invented the App Store, the company that taught a billion humans to tap an app icon to do a thing, is quietly building the architecture that makes that entire interaction pattern unnecessary.

The Framework You Don't See

Yes, Siri is getting a conversational interface, Project Campo, internally. Chat bubbles, pinned conversations, a standalone app that looks and feels like the AI assistants everyone's been using for the past two years. That's the surface. What's underneath is what should make every developer, every product leader, and every small business owner sit up and pay attention.^{2, 3, 4}

Apple isn't racing to build the best chatbot. They're building the orchestration layer, the system-level plumbing that sits between every AI model and every app on your phone. Siri is the face. The operating system is the body. And it speaks in a model context protocol.

Nate Jones wrote the definitive analysis of this on his Substack. He described the distinction between what Apple is doing and what everyone else is doing as "agent as a layer versus agent as an app," and called that design decision "the one that makes everything else possible."^* He's right. And it echoes what I described in "The Last App You'll Ever Download".

The company that built the App Store is building the system that replaces the App Store's fundamental interaction model.

Plumbing Becomes Infrastructure

Three pieces make this work.

First, App Intents. Apple's framework for letting apps expose structured actions to the system. It's been around since iOS 16, but Apple has been expanding it aggressively, rolling out more domains that span media, camera, mail, photos, documents, and beyond. Each domain contains predefined intents that Siri and Apple Intelligence can invoke directly. No navigating menus. No walking through screens. You describe what you want, the agent talks to the intent. The UI disappears.^{5, 6, 7, 8}

Second, Apple is clearly moving toward wiring context-sharing protocols directly into the operating system. Model Context Protocol (MCP) is one prominent open standard in this space, and it's increasingly discussed as the invisible plumbing beneath the composable future. If Apple bakes MCP, or a very close cousin, into App Intents, that protocol effectively becomes a platform primitive on 1.5 billion devices, baked into the same layer as Siri, Spotlight, Shortcuts, and widgets. Not an abstraction. Not a developer experiment. Operating system infrastructure.^{5, 6, 7, 8, 9}

Third, a revamped on-device AI framework building on Core ML, with better quantization, memory-efficient adapters, and streaming token generation on Apple Silicon. The priority is making it easier for developers to plug in powerful third-party and first-party models, potentially through an MCP-style protocol, without hand-rolling their own inference stack.^{5, 6, 7}

App Intents is the API surface. MCP-style context protocols are the wiring. The new AI runtime is the model integration layer. And Apple sits at the center of all three.^{5, 6, 7}

What This Actually Means

Find the layer between users and the thing users want, and own it. The App Store. The payment rail. The notification surface. The search index.

This is what's being applied to the agentic era. If your app doesn't expose structured intents, Siri can't act on it. If Siri can't act on it, Siri can't recommend it. If Siri can't recommend it, your app doesn't surface when someone says "order me dinner" or "book a ride" or "schedule that meeting." Jones draws the parallel to search engine optimization, "apps that don't expose intents are apps that don't rank"^*, and the comparison is spot on. Write that one down in your mental notebook. SEO gave you years. This transition will be much, much faster.^{5, 6, 7, 8}

The Google dimension makes it stranger. Apple's multibillion-dollar partnership puts Gemini behind Siri's cloud reasoning, running inside Private Cloud Compute, where data is encrypted and designed so Google can't see user content and Apple's own access is tightly constrained. Google provides the muscle. Apple keeps control of the experience, the data pipeline, and the privacy architecture. It's a practical, elegant arrangement, and also a temporary one. Apple has never been comfortable depending on someone else's engine. They replaced Intel. They'll replace this too. The Gemini deal is a bridge while they pour the foundation for the thing that comes after.^{10, 11, 12}

The View From Here

In February, I described a future where your local farm doesn't need a Shopify store, a separate ordering app, and a texting platform. It exposes its inventory and ordering logic once, just once, and customers reach it through whatever intelligent interface they already use. The farm focuses on growing food while the plumbing handles the rest.

What the Scaffolding Was For

Some argue that Apple is famously late to every platform shift. Smartphones. Tablets. Smartwatches. ARM-based laptop processors. Every time, they waited. Every time, the pundits wrote them off. Every time, the vertical integration, hardware, silicon, OS, developer framework, user experience, all designed as a single system, won the premium tier of the market for the next decade.^{5, 6, 7}

The new Siri and Apple Intelligence roadmap was first outlined at WWDC 2024. Since then, key pieces have slipped more than once, while Samsung and Google have rushed Gemini-powered, agent-like features onto their latest Galaxy devices and into Gemini Personal Intelligence for US users. The critics are shouting that Apple is behind.^{2, 3, 12}

But behind and losing are different things. Google's current approach leans heavily on computer vision to navigate existing app interfaces, fast, impressive, and available today on any app without developer adoption. It also breaks when apps redesign their UI, struggles with edge cases, and builds no lasting structural advantage. Apple's approach requires developers to opt in, which is slower. But every developer who adopts App Intents makes the ecosystem more valuable for agents, and every agent that uses an MCP-style protocol through Apple's system integration makes App Intents more valuable to developers. One is a feature. The other is a flywheel.^{5, 6, 7, 8}

You don't open an app. You say what you need. And 1.5 billion devices, running the same orchestration layer, speaking the same protocol, figure out how to make it happen.^{5, 6, 7}

I'm incredibly excited for this year's WWDC. The pieces Apple has been laying down, App Intents, on-device AI, context protocols, are all converging at once. I can't wait to see what they announce and what it unlocks for developers and small businesses alike.

---

---