People do not want Apps (read complexity)

Provocative title I know. Here's a thought. People want what an app provide like access to their photos or an ability to edit or share their photos. And while apps provide this wanted access it's the result people want not the app itself.

Well, you might think, if the app gives me what I want and without the app I don't get what I want then what's the point in separating the result from the app given I can't get the result without the app?

Here's an idea, move all the functionality of app into the OS itself and turn the functionality of apps into OS extensions.

Let all this creativity energy going into apps go into extension for functions people want.

I've begun doing this in my own thinking and use of my Mac. The first step was to empty my email account of all customized mailboxes and depreciating the email app to the status of a utility in my thinking. Using Keyboard Maestro (KM), I now move all my emails to desktop and delete them from the Mail app. I then use a series of KM shortcuts to file items and mark the ones that need actions using the built in tagging system.

​But why go thru all this when it's working the way it is?

All of this in guided by a notion of complexity, our limited ability to deal with complexity, and moving toward simplifying things.

Here's a simple complexity guide: 1 is simple. 2 is complex. 3 is impossible. For example, a light switch is simple because one action (moving it upwards) produces the result (the light goes on) and one action (moving it downwards) produces the result (the light goes off). That is a model for simplicity with one action producing the result. If it took two actions to get the light on or off, say, moving it upwards and then rotating it to the right or left depending on the color or intensity wanted then it becomes complex because you need to remember which direction to turn it after moving it upwards.

Anyway, before this post becomes much more complex, I'll end with dangling proposition that multiple apps, rather than one OS with extensions, leads to our current situation of having multiple databases (filing systems) and that is a complexity we'd all be better without.

​Perhaps more on this later...