Before AI, most apps chased the largest possible market, the only scale where the economics worked. AI removed that constraint. Software that took months now takes hours, and what was intractable before will start to show up.

Personal apps#

Something only you care about, software built for yourself by yourself.

A script that texts you when your favorite coffee shop drops its prices. A dashboard that tracks your running routes against the weather.

Hyperlocal apps#

Software for a neighborhood, a building, a club.

An app that tracks when your building’s laundry room is free. A shared calendar for your campus’s communal events. A group chat that knows when the street parking on your block opens up. An app for your roommates so they know what’s in the fridge.

The audience is dozens of people, maybe hundreds, bound by a place or a common interest.

[… the in-between …]#

Between hyperlocal and planetary lies unfilled territory. Apps for a city, a region, a subculture scattered across geographies. These will fill in too.

Planetary apps#

Software that runs across the whole world, reacting and computing as a single organism.

The physical and the digital stop being separate layers, and the planet and its software run as one system. Autonomous and always on, never waiting for a human in the loop, it computes over state transitions rather than static queries.

What we called normal was the exception#

Personal and hyperlocal apps will vastly outnumber the ones we currently think of as typical, not because those apps go away, but because the long tail of small, specific, deeply local software becomes viable. More apps will exist at the edges than have ever been built.

Every point along that scale, from one person to the whole planet, is now a space where a distinct kind of software can exist.

See The Cambrian Explosion of Apps.