What the android/apple appstores have taught me compared to the old symbian appstore is that we don't need more apps, we need decent ones. The current appstores have more.

One of the advantages of FDroid is that although tiny compared to Play Store, it is much better curated.

Discovery definitely becomes more important in this world.

Fortunately AI helps with that too.

Why do you think it will not soon be biased as search is?

I think AI gives us the opportunity to write our own ranking algorithms. Of course most people will pick an off-the-shelf editorial perspective but I expect these to be much more configurable than the current state with a tiny number of algorithmic gatekeepers.

The cost of AI is training it. If you can't do it yourself (and you can't), you don't decide what the weights are.

You can steer an AI without training it. It’s called Prompt Engineering.

It doesn’t give you full control, but I believe it gives you enough control to do what I proposed for most consumers.

Prompt engineering is just the new google fu, but if google wants to ban something it won't be there and if they want to bump something it will be bumped.

IMO the problem with the current software landscape isn't the number of applications, it's the quality and availability of integrations. Everything is in it's own little kingdom, so the communication overhead is extreme and grows exponentially. And by overhead I mean human cognition - I need to remember what's in my notes, and then put that in my calendar, and then email it to myself or something, and on and on.

We have these really amazing computers with very high-quality software but still, so many processes are manual because we have too many hops from tool to tool. And each hop is a marginal increase in complexity, and an increase in risk of things going wrong.

I don't think AI will solve this necessarily, and it could make it worse. But, if we did want to improve it, AI can act as a sort of spongy API. It can make decisions in the face of uncertainty.

I imagine a world where I want to make a doctor's appointment and I don't open any apps at all, or pick up the phone. I tell my AI assistant, and it works it out, and I have all my records in one place. Maybe the AI assistant works over a phone line, like some sort of prehistoric amalgamation of old technology and new. Maybe the AI assistant doesn't even talk to a receptionist, but another AI assistant. Maybe it gives me spongy human information, but speaks to other's of it's kind in more defined interfaces and dialects. Maybe, in the future, there are no applications at all. Applications are, after all, a human construction. A device intended to replace labor, but a gross approximation of it.