Pick up your phone. Open Settings, go to Storage, and look at your apps.
You probably have around 80. That's the global average — somewhere between 60 and 90 applications installed on your device, spread across home screens and folders, most of them untouched in weeks. A few you forgot you downloaded. Others you keep meaning to delete but don't, the way you keep a pair of shoes in the closet that you haven't worn in a year.
Now think about which ones you opened today. Not this week. Today. Probably nine. Maybe eleven on a busy day. Over the course of a month, you'll use about thirty. The majority of applications on your phone serve no active purpose. They sit there, sending notifications you swipe away, updating themselves at 3am for features you'll never see.
But there's something else you did today, almost certainly without thinking about it. You scrolled. For what probably added up to two and a half hours — broken into dozens of micro-sessions throughout the day — you consumed hundreds of pieces of content. You didn't install anything to do this. You didn't sign up, onboard, enter a credit card, or sit through a tutorial. You opened an app you already had and started swiping.
Those two experiences — the dozens of apps you don't use and the feed you can't stop scrolling — sit right next to each other on your phone. They represent two fundamentally different models for how software and services reach people. One is quietly failing. The other is absorbing more of our time and money every year. The gap between them is one of the more interesting structural questions in technology right now.
The app store hit a ceiling
There are over 2 million apps on each of the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. About 1,200 new ones appear on Google Play every day. The supply side of the app economy has never been bigger.
The demand side has been shrinking for five years.
Global app downloads peaked at 135 billion in 2020 — a pandemic high, when people were stuck indoors and willing to try anything. By 2025, that number had dropped to 107 billion. That's a decline of more than 20%, and it's not a temporary dip. It's consistent, year over year, across the US, Europe, Japan, South Korea — the markets where smartphones have been everywhere for a decade.
While downloads fell, spending went up. Consumers spent $156 billion on apps in 2025, up from $127 billion the year before. People are paying more money through fewer apps. The ones that survived the discovery problem are capturing more value, while everything else is invisible.
The average person uses thirty apps per month. That means millions of them — built by real teams who spent real money — exist but are never found. Not because they're bad. Because the distribution model itself has a discovery problem so fundamental that quality alone isn't enough. You have to already be known to be found.
The app store was supposed to be the great equalizer — anyone could build something and put it in front of millions. As the stores grew to millions of apps, that promise eroded. The store became a search engine for things you already know about, not a place to discover things you don't.
Subscription fatigue is real, and it's accelerating
The app store's discovery problem has a twin on the subscription side.
Think about the consumer software in your life. You might pay for a budgeting app like Monarch Money. A tax tool like TurboTax. A fitness tracker. A meditation app. A meal planner. A language learning app. A password manager. Each one has its own subscription, its own login, its own onboarding flow, its own interface to learn.
You use TurboTax once a year. The budgeting app maybe once a week. The meditation app for two enthusiastic weeks and then never again. But they all keep charging.
The average American has 8.2 active subscriptions and spends $219 per month on them — but when asked to estimate, they guess $86. A 2.5x gap between what people think they're paying and what they're actually paying. That gap is already showing: the average household cut from 4.1 paid subscriptions in 2024 to 2.8 in 2025 — a 32% drop in a single year.
When researchers ask why people cancel, the number one reason isn't price. It's insufficient usage — 37% of cancellations happen because people realize they're paying for something they barely use. Cost is second at 35%. The categories hit hardest are exactly the ones you'd expect: fitness apps, meditation apps, budgeting tools — services where the content feels repetitive and features blur together across competing products.
Global consumer spending on subscription apps passed $190 billion in 2025 — in a market where the vast majority of apps are never discovered and the ones that are get canceled anyway.
Consumers aren't rejecting software. They're rejecting the model. Too many apps, each solving one narrow problem, each requiring its own subscription, its own login, its own interface. People don't want eight apps for eight tasks. They want the tasks done.
Outcomes, not tools
People don't want tax software. They want their taxes done. They don't want a budgeting app. They want to know where their money went. They don't want a fitness tracker. They want a workout that works for them. The tool is a means to an outcome, and most of the time, the consumer is stuck doing the work the tool was supposed to eliminate — learning the interface, entering data, interpreting results.
Sequoia Capital's Pat Grady named this directly at their 2025 AI Ascent conference: the next trillion-dollar opportunity is selling outcomes, not tools.
If the product is an outcome rather than an application, the consumer doesn't need to install anything. They don't need to learn an interface. They don't need a subscription to a tool they'll use three times a month. They need a result, delivered in whatever form reaches them where they already are.
The feed already won the attention war
The average person spends 2 hours and 21 minutes per day on social media. TikTok captures about 55 minutes of that. Instagram adds 32. Total mobile screen time is roughly 3.6 hours per day, with 88% of it spent inside apps — and the dominant ones are feed-based.
A consumption study puts this in physical terms: the average social media user scrolls through approximately 300 feet of content per day. That's about the height of the Statue of Liberty. Every day.
The vertical feed has become the dominant way people interact with their phones. Not the home screen. Not email. It captures more human attention hours globally than anything else on a screen.
And it's no longer just for watching things.
In-feed commerce — pioneered by platforms like TikTok Shop — grew from nearly zero to $64.3 billion in global sales in roughly three years. In the US, it more than doubled year over year to $15.82 billion in 2025. Two-thirds of those sales came not from a dedicated shopping tab but from creator videos in the regular feed — content that happened to also be a storefront.
US social commerce as a whole reached $87 billion in 2025 and is expected to cross $100 billion in 2026. The feed is not just where people give their attention. It's where they spend their money.
These platforms proved something specific: you can put the transaction inside the content. The user doesn't leave the feed. They don't switch apps. They don't navigate to a website. The purchase happens inside the thing they were already doing.
But so far, in-feed commerce sells physical products — lipstick, phone cases, household goods. The question is whether that same distribution model extends to services and software.
The unbundling pattern
There's a pattern that has repeated across every major content and commerce category over the past twenty years, and it's worth asking whether software is next.
Music went from albums to iTunes singles to Spotify streams. The atomic unit shrank from a $15 CD to a single track played on demand.
Television went from cable bundles to Netflix series to individual episodes and clips circulating on social media. The atomic unit went from "pay for 500 channels" to "watch this one scene someone posted."
News went from newspaper subscriptions to websites to individual articles distributed through social feeds. The atomic unit became the headline and the link.
Commerce went from physical stores to online listings to products appearing directly in your feed. The atomic unit went from "drive to the mall" to "see it while scrolling, buy it without leaving."
In every case, the same thing happened: the bundle got decomposed into its smallest useful unit, and that unit got distributed through a feed. The discovery mechanism shifted from "go to the store and browse" to "the algorithm brings it to you." The friction of access dropped to nearly zero.
Software hasn't gone through this yet. The dominant distribution models — the app store and the SaaS subscription — are both bundles. An app is a bundle of features behind a single install. A SaaS product is a bundle of capabilities behind a monthly payment. You commit to the whole thing to access any part of it.
But think about how people actually use these tools. Nobody opens TurboTax and uses every feature. They want to estimate their refund. That's one task. A budgeting app has dozens of screens, but the user usually just wants to know where their money went this month. A fitness app tracks workouts, plans meals, logs sleep, counts steps — but on any given day, you're only doing one of those things. Discrete tasks, done at different moments, for different reasons. Each one is a single unit of work — an outcome — packaged inside a larger application that the user has to install, subscribe to, and pay for in its entirety.
Every other medium got unbundled to its smallest useful unit and redistributed through a feed. Software is still sold in bundles — as apps and subscriptions — in an era where consumers are, by the numbers, retreating from that model.
Super apps aren't theoretical
If using services without installing anything sounds abstract, it's worth noting that 949 million people already do it. WeChat's Mini Programs let people in China access banking, food delivery, ride-hailing, healthcare, and e-commerce — all inside one app, with no downloads, no app store, no separate subscriptions. The conditions that made that possible — smartphone saturation, app fatigue, preference for consolidated experiences — are increasingly present everywhere.
The supply side didn't exist until AI
There's one reason this hasn't happened in the West, and it's straightforward.
Until recently, building a functional interactive tool — something people could actually use, not just look at — required a team of software engineers. Time. Money. You can't fill a marketplace with useful tools if each one takes months to build.
AI changed the math.
One person can now describe what they want a tool to do, and AI builds it. What used to take a funded startup months to ship, a single person can now create in a weekend. The pool of people who can build functional software expanded from professional programmers to anyone who can clearly describe a problem. That's not an incremental change. That's a fundamental shift in who can create what.
The creator economy — already valued at $252 billion in 2025 and projected to reach $750 billion by 2030 — has been growing for years. But the nature of what creators can create has changed. It's no longer limited to videos, photos, and text. AI gave creators the ability to build functional tools. The creator who used to make a tutorial video explaining a spreadsheet formula can now build the calculator itself.
Downloads fall, subscriptions shrink, the feed grows
What form it takes isn't certain.
You can't install 1,000 apps. Your phone can hold them, technically, but you won't use them. The overhead of finding them, downloading them, learning each one, managing the subscriptions — it adds up to a ceiling that no amount of better marketing can break through.
But you can scroll 1,000 posts. You already do, every day. And the nature of what a "post" can be is changing faster than most people realize.
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