It was April of 2015 and I had just returned to a burning summer in India from my startup stint in London. I wasn’t happy with the heat, but I’ve never been good with adjusting to climate change. I’m spoilt by the California weather and my move to the chilly streets of Shoreditch the year before wasn’t easy either. But weather had little to do with my decision to sweat in the humidity of Mumbai.

I wanted to see how the burst of smartphone adoption had impacted the lives of those traditionally used to a life without dependency on technology. There were quite a few trends that stuck out, but one in particular. The neck-breaking growth of messaging, especially WhatsApp. It was this realization that would drive my contribution to Haptik , a personal assistance service over chat.

But you’re probably not here to read about my journey. So lets come to the real reason why you’re here.

Chatbots are being touted as the future of apps, but there have been great examples of how and why they will never reach this destiny.

When Sundar Pichai, launched Allo as the chat based Google Assistant at Google IO, he said “I believe we are at a seminal moment. We as Google have evolved significantly over the past 10yrs, and we believe that we’re poised to take a big leap forward in the next 10.….We truly want to take the next step and be more assistive for our users. So today, we’re announcing the google assistant.”

But Google was already late to the party!

Satya Nadella, CEO at Microsoft has held his opinion that AI-assisted “agents” like Cortana are going to change how we use the web.

David Marcus, Lead of Facebook Messenger launched Facebook M last year saying, “it’s an exciting step towards enabling people on Messenger to get things done across a variety of things, so they can get more time to focus on what’s important in their lives.”

Dag Kittlaus, the man behind Siri earlier this year launched Viv, almost as a Siri 2.0 with all the capabilities of an assistant. His demo video probably surfaced the computer screen of every chatbot enthusiast out there.

But not everyone is a believer.

There are counter arguments on the success and feasibility of chat screens and conversational commerce. Connie Chan, Partner at a16z had a long Twitter piece about why conversational commerce is not the way forward. The concept of walled gardens showcases why chat platforms don’t really solve the problem of apps. Dan Grover articulates what many want to say with regard to bots, design and why bots may not replace apps.

Imagining the future of apps and sharing novel ideas on the subject has became a trend amongst strong opinionated (smart) minds of the human race. In these tides of strong opinions, Indian companies are not well represented. My experience at Haptik helps me contribute with insights into what I believe could be the future of our interaction with mobile phones.

But why are we talking about ‘chatbots’?

To answer this question we must look at the evolution of the preferred way of “getting things done”.

People engage in 100–200 transactions everyday. Right from sending text messages, replying to emails, setting reminders and placing lunch orders the list goes on. We love transacting. Maybe because it makes us feel productive. So when Jobs put a smartphone in our hands, that was it made us feel powerful and we naturally transitioned from old/dumb phones.

Then came the App store and it stimulated our fascination of trying new interfaces to get things done. Before we knew it, our urge to experiment had us overloaded with apps. Today there are 4.1M apps on both the Google & App Store combined.

But this is not just a phone (hardware) memory problem. We actually capped out on human attention span.

Human memory is weak and requires frequent activation. To avoid being lost in the crowd, the initial idea was to create “hooks” for companies.

Hooks are what people instantly associate with a company/brand when they hear the name or see the logo

Then we started capping out on these hooks and companies started fighting for domination. Growing ambitions led to a sort of convergence and a considerable overlap in the things that one app could get done.

As an effort to stay in the lead, startups moved with the strategy of making their services accessible from within other apps. They started assigning separate teams to build and maintain APIs (and SDKs in some cases) that other apps can consume to include their experience within new interfaces.

So “App-A” could also provide the features and services of “App-B” by using their API. Interestingly, “App-B” could do the same with “App-A”. Well, you guessed it. Now App-A or App-B are practically competing with each other instead of strengthening their individual value propositions.

These ambitions have given a whole new direction to the trajectory of software technology. A trajectory towards the non-existence of independent apps.