Web Directions Year round learning for product, design and engineering professionals

Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody (2008) was about the democratisation of coordination…what happens when everybody builds. Shirky’s vision of a world where “people are given the tools to do things together, without needing traditional organizational structures” didn’t pan out quite as optimistically as he and many others, myself included, thought it would. But something is happening right now that echoes the trends Shirky was observing in those early days of Web 2.0. Perhaps it will turn out differently this time.

Yesterday, my 13-year-old daughter sent me a link to a platform that she and I have been discussing the concept of. Aippy is kind of like TikTok for apps, where folks can create, share, and remix apps.

It’s an idea I’ve had in mind for a few months. But somebody’s already built it, and there are already hundreds, if not thousands, of apps on the platform. 

Something is happening right now that is reshaping the technology landscape more profoundly than most people in the industry have yet recognised. Pundits like Benedict Evans don’t think it’s happening. So, it’s even more likely to be the case. 

Millions of people who have never written a line of code are starting to build applications — not scripts or simple automations, but genuine applications with interfaces and logic and persistence.

Just what implications this will have, what second-order effects we’ll see are very hard to predict. But one thing seems clear: the platforms and distribution models we’ve built over the past fifteen years of the smartphone era are not designed for the world that’s emerging. In fact, they’re designed for almost exactly the opposite.

The Web as Default

Most of the people now discovering they can build software will build for the web. This isn’t because the web is inherently superior for every application. It’s because the web is the path of least resistance — and for non-developers, it’s essentially the only path at all.

Consider the friction involved in building something for iOS. You need an Apple Developer account. You need to understand provisioning profiles and code signing. You need Xcode. You need to navigate TestFlight or the App Store review process. Each step assumes you already know what you’re doing, that you’ve made a deliberate professional choice to be a software developer.

Now consider building for the web. You write some HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. You open it in a browser. That’s it. No accounts, no certificates, no review processes. You can build something in a conversation with an AI at 10pm and be using it by 10:15pm.

You can share a single file with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript via a text (OK, that’s not going to work on a mobile. So I see a huge opportunity for the instant ephemeral deployment). 

For millions of new creators, the web won’t be a choice — it will be the only realistic option. The entire edifice of native app development assumes a world of professional developers building products. That’s not the world that’s emerging.

Software as Content

So, if millions of people are building software, how does that software spread? How do people discover it?

The App Store model assumes software is a product with high cost of production, even if just in terms of the time and expertise of its developer. It’s something built deliberately, submitted for review, published, with the hope people find it through search or charts (and realistically through paid advertising—either on Meta products or within app stores themselves). The implicit model is commercial: you’re building something to sell, or at least to distribute at scale through official channels and monetize through in-app purchases or advertising, or as an interface to a service.

But that’s not what most of this new software will be. Someone solves a problem for themselves. Perhaps just to entertain themselves. They mention it to a friend who has the same problem. Or sensibilities. The friend wants it too. Maybe they share it with others. Maybe it spreads through a community. Maybe it goes viral in some small corner of the internet.

Or, like most of the apps on Aippy, it’s entertainment. It’s competing for time and attention with Netflix, and Instagram, and sleep. 

This pattern — creation, casual sharing, organic spread — looks a lot more like how content moves on TikTok or Instagram than how apps move through the App Store. Software becomes something you make and share, and remix. Not something you publish and sell. It surfaces through social connections and social discovery, not through store listings and search rankings.

None of our current mobile platforms are designed for this. The gatekeeping model — submit, review, approve, publish — doesn’t make sense when software is created and shared at the speed of content. The app store model doesn’t make sense when most software isn’t a product at all.

The Platform Problem

The structural misalignment, between this emerging new model of software and our existing software platforms, is acute. The devices where most people live their digital lives (and a big chunk of their entire lives) — smartphones — are precisely the devices least equipped to support this new model of software creation and distribution.

We’ve seen how the process of getting an app onto one of these devices is high friction and requires expert knowledge and the payment of at least some money for a developer account. 

But while the Web will be the natural platform for the creation and distribution of this new kind of app, on iOS and Android, the web is constrained in what it can do. Some of these constraints are technical, but many are policy choices that protect the primacy of native apps and their associated app stores. Many of the capabilities your phone has — Bluetooth, NFC, sensors, background processing — are available to apps that go through an app store process, but unavailable to web applications that don’t.

More fundamentally, neither major smartphone platform is designed for frictionless software sharing. Yes, you can use WebShare to share a URL, but if that is a web app, having someone “install” it the way they’d save a TikTok to their favourites is a baffling process that almost no one understands or uses.

Today the entire distribution model assumes software comes from developers via the platforms themselves, not from anyone via social connections.

For over a decade, we’ve accepted this app store model as the natural order of the mobile experience. The trade-offs may have seemed reasonable: curation, security, a consistent experience, in exchange for some loss of openness.

But the trade-offs were calculated for a world where software was a product made by developers for users. In a world where everyone is potentially a creator, those trade-offs look very different. The walls that once felt protective are now a huge constraint.

The Appliance Assumption

When Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone in 2007, the world was full of people who had never used a smartphone, who may have been intimidated by technology, who needed protection from the sharper edges of computing. The appliance model — a device that just worked, that couldn’t be easily broken, that maintained a consistent experience — made sense for that audience. It was a vision Jobs had had decades before with the Mac. A computer “for the rest of us”. A computer that “just works”. 

That audience has changed. The world has changed. Children, teenagers, young adults have grown up building in Minecraft and Roblox. They’re not intimidated by technology; they’re native to it. They develop and share ingenious workarounds to the social media bans that happen in their schools and even entire countries.

And now they’re discovering they can build real software, applications shaped precisely to their needs and interests.

The appliance model doesn’t serve them. It constrains them. The platforms designed to protect users from complexity are now protecting users from their own creativity and that of their peers.

Where the Puck Is Going

Steve Jobs was fond of quoting Wayne Gretzky: “Skate to where the puck is going, not where it has been.”

The puck is going somewhere new. The democratisation of software creation is not a minor trend. It’s a fundamental shift in the relationship between people and technology, as significant as the shift from desktop to mobile. From professional to user-generated content. Indeed I’d argue more significant than these.

Software will be created by everyone, often ephemeral. Shared like content, discovered through social and algorithmic channels, and used in contexts we can’t imagine yet. Web technologies will be the substrate for most of this creation, because the web is the only platform open enough to support it.

The mobile platforms that dominate our digital lives were built for a different world. They assume software is a product made by professionals and distributed through official channels. They assume users need protection from the complexity of software. They assume gatekeeping is a feature, not a bug.

These assumptions, however well intentioned when formulated nearly 2 decades ago, are now antiquated. And the platforms built on them — for all their current dominance — may find themselves on the wrong side of a generational shift in how software gets made, shared, and used.

This shift isn’t coming, it’s arrived (like William Gibson said of the future, “it’s just not evenly distributed”).

Which platforms will adapt to support it, and which will discover too late that they were skating to where the puck used to be?