March 19, 2026
InsightsYou Don't Need an App for That
A follow-up to The Last App You'll Ever Download
Last month, I wrote about the slow, inevitable collapse of the app model, how the capabilities we've been downloading as individual icons are dissolving into composable services that AI agents orchestrate through conversation. No grid. No swiping. No thirty-seven-page privacy policy for a flashlight.
Yesterday, Carl Pei said the same thing. From the hardware side.
Pei, the CEO of Nothing, the company that literally manufactures the glass rectangle in your pocket, told TechCrunch that smartphone apps will disappear as AI agents take their place.1 Not some of them. Not the obscure ones nobody uses. Apps. The whole model. Gone.
When a software company says this, you can call it a product pitch. When the person who builds the phone says it, the ground shifts a little differently.
The Pattern Is the Point
Shopify's president called AI agents the "new front door" for commerce. Now a hardware CEO says the app model itself is the thing being replaced. These aren't isolated takes. They're triangulation, different industries, different incentives, different vantage points, all converging on the same signal like fishermen reading the same shift in the current.
The platform companies see it. The commerce companies see it. Now the hardware companies see it. The only people who don't see it are the ones still commissioning app icons.
What This Means for the Rest of Us
For small businesses in Hawaii, the ones I build for, the ones running five disconnected tools to do one job, this is clarifying. The future isn't another app. It isn't a new platform to learn, a new login to remember, a new monthly subscription for software that does one thing and does it in isolation.
The future is your business being reachable, understandable, and transactable through whatever intelligent interface your customer already talks to. Not your app. Not your website. Your information, structured, composable, ready to be found by something smarter and more patient than a search engine.
We spent eighteen years building a hundred separate lightsabers when what we needed was the Force, invisible, unified, always there. The device doesn't matter. The interface doesn't matter. The intelligence does.
Notes & references
1. TechCrunch, "Nothing CEO Carl Pei says smartphone apps will disappear as AI agents take their place" (March 18, 2026)
Read the original post: The Last App You'll Ever Download