The Future of Mobile Apps

I recently commented on Mukund Mohan’s blog about my take on the future of Mobile Apps in response to his thought provoking blog. I thought I take this opportunity to add more color to it and describe my view of the future of mobile apps.

The Future of Mobile Apps

As shown in the image here, the bottom of the pyramid contains apps that are all about empowering the individual in ways to communicate, shop, purchase, consume etc. This is driven by understanding each user (business or consumer) and is largely driven by attributes of the user. For e.g. location attribute. These are the apps that we are exposed to currently. Lets call these “Identity Awareness” apps as they are all about empowering one’s identity on mobile devices. The communication is similar to a hub and spoke model.

I foresee a evolution of apps from here where the apps shall enable “Situational Awareness”. As a small example, why should the owner of the device set their mobile on vibrate mode or silent mode? Why can’t the app figure out looking up the Outlook calendar app or Google calendar app that I, the owner of this device, am busy. Same while watching a movie in a theater. This may include cognition of the user that shall somehow be manifested in the apps.

The top of the pyramid in the evolution of apps shall enable “Self awareness”. In the truest analogy with spirituality (including this entire pyramid), self-aware apps shall realize it is part of the universe when connected to other apps in the Internet of Things. In this case, not only are the apps situationally aware, but also can communicate with other apps and orchestrate to optimize your world in real time.

It will be fascinating to see more and more apps take continuing advantage of the increasingly powerful mobile devices to provide naturally express-able extensions of user’s mental models.