Did you know that, in the next five to 10 years, none of us will be using apps on our phones anymore? That’s a claim that was made today by Tim Hoettges, CEO of Deutsche Telekom, at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
May I respectfully disagree.
Hoettges made the comment while talking up DT’s “T-phone” concept, a phone that uses an AI concierge as its interface. Powered by Brain.ai’s AI interface tech and with the processing taking place in the cloud, it will book trips for you, buy things for you, and communicate with others on your behalf (the mobile network operator also showed off a smartphone with a Qualcomm processor that will be able to do the processing locally).
It’s certainly plausible that this sort of interface will soon become the norm, though I’d be surprised if it’s operators such as DT that will be seeing the biggest uptake. Far likelier is that people will be using the AI assistants that are baked into their phones by device manufacturers like Apple, Google, or Samsung, or offered by other giants such as Microsoft/OpenAI. This feels like an echo of the operators’ past efforts to be the go-to destination for modern messaging or mobile entertainment—anything but a mere provider of connectivity. Those efforts have generally failed.
But on a broader level, I still don’t think apps will all be killed off.
Some will if all they do is help you execute a certain task, like booking a trip. I’m all for having an assistant relieve me of that tedium—though only if it really works for me, rather than being a friendly face on some corporate effort. As I’ve mentioned before, I do not trust the idea of a cloud-based virtual assistant that acts as my agent, and would much rather have a local AI, with proven and guaranteed privacy and security, cautiously handling my data as it interfaces with online services.
But not all apps are so prosaic. Some are destinations in themselves, for different reasons. For example, I find it fun to browse through my local classifieds app (Kleinanzeigen, previously owned by eBay) for musical equipment that people around Berlin, where I live, are selling. Sure, I could have my assistant looking out for certain items that people may list, so I get a heads-up as quickly as possible, but sometimes I just want to browse, in the hope of finding something I didn’t know I wanted. Much the same can be said for YouTube or for social networking apps.
Also, staying in the musical domain, I recently bought a fantastic Marshall-style amp-in-a-box guitar-effects pedal from Universal Audio (the Lion, in case you’re wondering) that offloads much of its functionality to an accompanying smartphone app, in order to keep the pedal’s hardware interface relatively straightforward. I go to the app to save and retrieve certain combinations of settings—which an assistant could do for me—but also to have fun fiddling around with obscure settings that make a marked difference to the sound. Again, the app is the destination, even if that means I spend a little too much time tone-chasing when I should be writing music instead.
So sure, I think we’ll be using apps less, within Hoettges’s stated time frame. But it doesn’t make sense to say apps will become a thing of the past, at least not so quickly. Many apps will have to adapt to survive, probably with AI-enabled features, but those that promise depth and serendipity—things you don’t want to have automated away—have a good shot at sticking around in some form. I also wouldn’t be entrusting my encrypted messaging to a cloud-based AI anytime soon. More news below.
David Meyer
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NEWSWORTHY
Alibaba ownership disclosures. With the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission sniffing around its ownership, Alibaba has admitted wider partial state ownership of its businesses—by Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and other countries’ sovereign wealth funds—than it had previously disclosed. As Bloomberg reports, Chinese SOEs have stakes in six of the company’s direct-sales businesses, and in other parts of its empire. This could give Beijing influence over director nominations and company decisions.
AI in geopolitics. The Indian government is furious at Google after its Gemini AI was caught telling someone that Prime Minister Narendra Modi was “accused of implementing policies some experts have characterized as fascist.” Modi has indeed faced such accusations previously, but the government says Gemini is biased and is threatening legal action. Google says it “worked quickly to address this issue,” Business Today reports. Meanwhile, Sherwood Media reported last week that Microsoft’s Copilot AI made up Vladimir Putin quotes about the death of Alexei Navalny, despite the fact that the Russian dictator hasn’t publicly addressed the opposition leader’s recent demise.
LockBit’s back. After being severely disrupted by law enforcement, the LockBit gang claims to have relaunched its ransomware-for-hire business. Per Bleeping Computer, the gang posted a message about the “personal negligence and irresponsibility” that let authorities take down its infrastructure, and said their backup systems had survived Operation Cronos, with LockBit’s pay-up-or-else countdown timers again being up and running on a new dark web address. However, as the publication notes, LockBit’s “affiliates”—the cybercriminals who used its services—still “have a good reason to be distrustful” after the blow of last week’s disruption.
SIGNIFICANT FIGURES
28%
—Intuitive Machines’ share-price drop after the space exploration company said its Odysseus moon lander, the first commercial spacecraft to make a soft lunar landing, tipped over on arrival and is now lying on its side. The company nonetheless said Odysseus was “alive and well,” but that it would likely run out of power on Tuesday. The lander has already sent back a photo of its surroundings from the moon.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
As Nvidia hits $2 trillion, billionaire Marc Rowan’s asset manager Apollo calls AI a ‘bubble’ worse than even the dotcom era, by Christiaan Hetzner
Fortune asked Alexis Ohanian about being cut out of Reddit’s IPO filing by his onetime best friend. His response: ¯_(ツ)_/¯, by Paolo Confino
Ivanka Trump has a verified TikTok account despite Donald Trump railing against the service for being a national security threat, by Alexandra Sternlicht
Jeff Bezos and Nvidia join OpenAI and Microsoft in backing a humanoid robot unicorn valued at $2 billion, sources say, by Bloomberg
A working parent’s review of the Apple Vision Pro, by Dave Smith
BEFORE YOU GO
Wrong Slackbot. You have to admire the chutzpah. When Gizmodo writer Tom McKay left the company in 2022, he managed to lurk undetected in the company’s Slack messaging service for months by changing his profile to “Slackbоt,” including a slightly modified version of the standard Slackbot’s icon. (As The Verge reports, he used the Unicode character “о” in the profile name, as Slack doesn’t allow people to adopt its bot’s standardly rendered name.) He used the time to ping ex-colleagues with bot-like messages.
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