80% of Apps Are About to Die
You probably have 40+ apps on your phone right now. Within a few years, you might actually use about 10 of them.
That’s not my prediction. That’s the logical conclusion of what’s already happening with personal AI agents and it’s being driven by the same kind of shift that killed Blockbuster, turned newspapers into websites, and made your local travel agent obsolete.
Let me explain.
The MyFitnessPal Problem
Here’s a question: why do you need a calorie tracking app when your AI agent already knows where you are?
Think about it. Your personal agent knows your schedule. It knows you just walked into a restaurant. It knows you’ve been trying to eat cleaner this month. It knows you had a heavy meal last night. It knows your weight goals.
So when you sit down at that restaurant, your agent can already suggest what to order - without you ever opening an app, scanning a barcode, or manually logging anything.
Peter Steinberger, the creator of OpenClaw (the open-source AI agent that just hit 180,000+ GitHub stars), put it bluntly in his recent conversation with Lex Fridman: “Why do you need MyFitnessPal when the agent already knows where I am?”
He’s right. And MyFitnessPal is just the tip of the iceberg.
The Pattern Is Everywhere
Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
Your sleep tracker app? Your agent already knows how you slept — it can pull data from your wearable, adjust your gym workout based on your recovery, and text your training partner that you’re doing a lighter session today. No app required.
Your smart home app? Steinberger described how his agent controls his cameras through their API directly. No need to open the Sonos app when your agent can talk to the speakers. No need for the Ring app when your agent already has access.
Your calendar app? “I don’t wanna open a calendar app,” Steinberger said. “I just wanna tell my agent, ‘Hey, remind me about this dinner tomorrow night,’ and maybe invite two of my friends and send a WhatsApp message to them.” One sentence replaces three apps.
Your Uber Eats app? Your agent can figure out how to use your phone, open the browser, navigate the site, and place the order. Or call an API directly. Or find a better deal elsewhere. The app becomes invisible — just a slow API your agent calls on your behalf.
Every App Is Now Just a Slow API
This is the key insight that most people are missing.
It doesn’t matter whether a company wants to be agent-friendly or not. If your AI agent can access something through a browser, it’s already an API. A slow one, sure. But a working one.
Steinberger watched his agent happily click the “I’m not a robot” button on websites. Cloudflare and others are trying to block bots, but the reality is straightforward: if a human can access it through a browser, an agent can too. It’s just a matter of speed.
Companies that get ahead of this — that build proper APIs and make themselves easy for agents to work with — will thrive. They become the preferred, fast path.
Companies that fight it? They just become the slow path. And eventually, users stop caring which path their agent takes.
Who Dies, Who Survives
Here’s the split as I see it:
Dead apps walking: Single-purpose utility apps that exist to display or capture simple data. Calorie trackers, habit trackers, basic to-do lists, weather apps, simple finance dashboards, most smart home controllers. Anything where the core value is “show me this data” or “let me input this data.” An agent does both better because it has context these apps never will.
Apps that transform: Companies that rapidly pivot to being agent-facing services. Uber Eats doesn’t die — it becomes the delivery API your agent calls. Spotify doesn’t die — it becomes the music service your agent manages. The app layer disappears, but the underlying service survives. The companies that build clean, agent-friendly interfaces fastest will win this transition.
Apps that survive: Anything where the core value is the experience itself, not the utility. Games. Creative tools where you want to be hands-on. Social platforms (though even these will change dramatically). Anything where removing the human interaction removes the point.
What This Means for You
If you’re a builder or developer: start thinking about how your product works when no human ever opens your UI. What’s your API story? What’s your agent story? Because the companies that answer those questions first will eat the lunch of those that don’t.
If you’re a user: this is genuinely exciting. The subscription fatigue, the app clutter, the constant context-switching between 15 different tools to get one thing done — that era is ending. Your agent handles the mess. You just say what you need.
If you’re an investor: pay very close attention to which companies are building for the agent-first world versus which are still building for the app-store world. That distinction is about to matter a lot.
The age of the app isn’t ending overnight. But the age of the app as the primary interface between you and digital services is absolutely ending. Your agent is becoming your operating system.
And that operating system doesn’t need 80 apps. It needs APIs, data, and permission to act on your behalf.
That’s it for this week. If you found this useful, share it with someone who’s still manually logging their calories.