Every year, we tap into our 750+ designers and developers to create Fjord Trends, a look at what we expect will impact design, people, technology and business in the coming year. The big question is how can brands – from large multinationals to nimble start-ups – take advantage of these trends to manage and grow their businesses as the world changes?

For the next few weeks, I will offer some tips for brands around each of the 10 trends from this year’s report. Today, we give you our fourth one – “Disappearing Apps.” (If you want to read our full Trends report, please click here.)

Eight years and hundreds of billions of downloads since Apple first introduced us to the revolutionary little digital squares, we’re at the start of a major shift in the app landscape. While apps are not going extinct, the landscape in which they operate is changing dramatically. Wave two is being defined by the reduction of apps to smaller services, which are re-composed by various providers to deliver more meaningful experiences for each person.

App fatigue is a major driving force for this shift. We have all become app administrators – downloading, opening, closing, deleting and toggling between them. People simply no longer want to switch apps or download a new one every time they want to interact with a brand or a service.

So if the primacy of apps is fading, how can brands be where their customers want them to be? Developers are taking the best micro-services from apps and exposing them in more natural use cases, when you need them. This idea of atomization is widespread in music streaming apps like Spotify, which now transcends environments (think: your living room to your car to your workspace) and is delivered through various branded partnerships (from Spotify’s own platform-specific interface to Ford’s voice assistant to the Runkeeper app).

Meanwhile, we are also seeing the rise of platforms that aggregate services and, by virtue, become the composer of the experience. No case is stronger than WeChat, a Chinese messaging app with nearly 600 million monthly active users. Known as the “super platform” or the “everything app,” people use WeChat to hail a cab, pay bills and more. One particular feature that showcases its service capabilities is a hosted app that controls the lights, temperature and settings of your hotel room. People are also using it as an everyday means of payment. In fact, one in five users use the WeChat payment feature on a regular basis.

Amazon Echo is another popular ecosystem serving as service composer, orchestrating across many brands and services. Amazon maintains the primary face and composes your experience by aggregating and pulling from various services such as your bank to Samsung’s SmartThings Hub (to control your home).

This also holds true for enterprises where platforms like Slack and Salesforce are acting as the primary channels for enterprise content and services.

This trend is developing quickly. Newly unveiled Viv is promising to be a service composer for your life. The promise of payment services seamlessly integrated allows users to pay bills, bring in a cleaning service, order groceries, share pictures and more.

While this sounds delightful to many users, this scenario also raises significant brand and consumer loyalty questions for each of those services, which may be faceless to the consumer.

To be where your consumers need you, it’s clear that brands need to take a less rigid approach to their products and services, allowing them to be super distributed across various platforms and third-party services, while still retaining their brand identity. Modern marketers need to operate in a world where the rules of branding are fundamentally challenged, where services appear intuitively to offer themselves to consumers according to their time, place or situation.

In this world, we suggest:

1. Determine what experience you can credibly compose for your customers

Are you destined to be a faceless service in someone else’s composition? The answer partly lies in your brand’s permission to own a holistic interaction. It’s early days but the time has come to invest in understanding what the future interactions and needs will be for your user, and design around them. You can win mind share (not to mention wallet share and heart share) by offering valuable services and products that seamlessly answer a need (not just a transaction). For instance, in the travel industry, there is still no dominant service composer that unites car rental, air and hotel service from purchase through to travel.

2. Balance being present and maintaining your brand

Not all organizations should or could be the composer of an experience. Being the best at a specific interaction is still a path to build loyalty. For instance, Uber is now a transportation option surfacing in places ranging from the United Airlines app to Google Maps, alongside walking and driving. The trick is that Uber has plugged into select ecosystems to be omnipresent when you need them, but have not ceded their brand or their face.

3. In this race, you need partners

We suggest our clients partner wisely to build their own services to win the moments that matter most to users. The brilliance of atomization is that it allows you to focus on distinguishing functionality while using partners for everything else. There are purpose-built services for so many features you may need from data visualization to data annotation. Every hour spent on non-distinguishing functionality is an hour wasted.

Key takeaway: As apps fade, compose and atomize services so your brand doesn’t also fade.

To access the full Fjord Trends report, please click here. For more posts like this one, check out some of Baiju's other thoughts here and here.