This morning I came across Apps considered harmful, by Duncan Cragg.

There is a lot of this sentiment floating around (this one posted in the Future of Coding space, but the rhetoric is extremely common more generally). A lot of the work out of the Ink & Switch folks is adjacent to it (and less rhetorically heated!), for example.

I… understand the frustration and the things it wants to solve. I get why folks were and are drawn to the ideas behind OpenDoc.

And yet, something does not “ring true” to me for it. For one, I do not share the “it is just because capitalism is bad and people are trying to take advantage of you to steal your moneys!” take that a lot of folks seem to gravitate toward around it. But for another, it reminds me at a “feel” level (so this is not well fleshed out for me) of the way many well-intended folks seem to think about free-and-open-source software: surely the only reason it has not caught on is Big Corporate Tech/The Man being against it! Well… no. There are other, deeper reasons Linux software is not as good, and many of them have to do with trade-offs around specialization.

There is, it seems to me, a fairly deep tension here between how deep and specialized a program can be vs. how easy it can be to “integrate” with other programs. I think about Dorico, for example: it is not — as far as I can see! — something which would even be possible to build with the “simple collection of components” model from tools like OpenDoc etc. Its entire value proposition is that there is a coherent whole to the application and its model of music-making. (The same goes for its various competitors.) Apps can do things by dint of specialization and focus that are harder and in some cases likely impossible in“inverted” models where the user “just” (notice that word!) composes things together from “components”. A “component” of Dorico rich enough to be useful would just be… an app, if perhaps one with different up-front extensibility and embed-ability models.

There is definitely value in figuring out (a) ways to make interactions between apps better and easier and (b) ways that the kinds of things which are better handled by user-constructed documents built of “components”. Likewise, many of the little app sandboxes out there are not taking advantage of the specialization that applications can afford. After all, the fact that apps can pull off things via specialization does not mean all or even very many apps do so. I do not think we are at a global maximum in software design.

I do think that it is easy for folks dissatisfied with the limitations of apps to overlook the many powerful affordances they offer, though, and for computing aficionados to overestimate the degree to which regular users even want to “compose together components”; the simplicity of the “app” model is one of its great strengths, even as it also (at least in its current form) also hobbles “power usage” even for those regular users.

More, perhaps, as my thoughts develop.