The Appification of Everything

I miss the clean sandwich. Not the sandwich itself, necessarily. I am not here to write a hymn to Boar's Head turkey or the damp dignity of shredded lettuce. I mean the transaction. The old shape of it. Door bell. Menu board. Counter. Person in an apron calling you “boss” like a tiny public blessing. Cash or card. Bag in hand. Gone.

Nobody asked for an account. Nobody wanted to text me a code. Nobody cared whether I preferred extra pickles enough to build a profile around it. Lunch ended at lunch. That used to be normal. Now lunch has a funnel.

The sandwich wants my email. The parking space wants my license plate, card number, phone number, and permission to send alerts. The dentist wants me in the portal. The school fundraiser has a platform with an enthusiastic mascot and a password reset flow. The grocery store has digital coupons that only work if you clip them, which feels like someone reinvented scissors badly. Even the dishwasher, one of the last honest machines in the house, has been invited to develop an online identity.

A dishwasher should wash dishes. That was the deal. Suds in, plates out. Nobody needs a relationship with the rinse cycle.

I am not anti-software. That would be ridiculous. I use maps, banking apps, delivery tracking, mobile boarding passes, calendar reminders, and all the rest of the tiny miracles. I also build things, which means I know perfectly well that software can remove nonsense from a process. A good system can save a human being from repeating the same miserable sentence four hundred times a week. A good app can turn a chore into a tap.

Wonderful. Build that one. The problem starts when every task gets treated as if it deserves a product team, a loyalty model, a dashboard, a retention strategy, and a push notification that sounds personally wounded when ignored.

There is a specific humiliation in standing beside your car, late for something, holding your phone at a scratched QR code taped to a pole. The sun is hitting the screen. The code will not scan. You try backing up, leaning in, wiping the lens on your shirt, looking like you are photographing evidence after a minor crime. Finally the page opens. It sends you to an app called Parkly or CurbFox or MeterNest, some startup name built from two soft nouns and a promise. You download it because the sign offers no other path. Now the app wants your plate. Fine. It wants your card. Fine. It wants your phone. Annoying, but fine. It sends a code. The code arrives late. You enter it. The app says the zone does not exist.

The old meter was a little metal jerk, sure. It ate quarters and judged you with a red flag. But it was honest. The meter wanted money. You wanted time. A clean, ugly bargain.

The app has nicer colors and worse vibes. That is the thing I keep noticing. Errands keep turning into onboarding. Park the car: onboarding. Order dinner: onboarding. Schedule a visit: onboarding. Pay a bill: onboarding. Pick up tickets: onboarding. Every normal action now arrives with a welcome screen, terms, permissions, a checkbox, a saved preference, and the faint sense that someone far away has mistaken your need to complete a task for a desire to enter a branded environment.

No. I came here for the bagel. The appification of everything is not simply “there are too many apps,” although yes, please look at my phone and explain why I have three ways to park within six towns. The stranger move is that businesses keep replacing their end of the interaction with a digital doorway and then calling the customer's climb through that doorway convenience.

The counter used to belong to the business. The form used to belong to the office. The cash register belonged to the store. The phone number belonged to a person who might sigh but could still help. Now the customer carries the counter around in a pocket. The customer types the data. The customer troubleshoots the error. The customer retries the upload. The customer learns the new interface because the old way has been quietly removed and nobody wants to say removed. They say streamlined.

Streamlined is one of those words that should make everyone pat their pockets and check for a missing wallet. A lot of app friction is small enough to be dismissed, which is how it survives. Add a phone number. Tap Continue. Create a password. Find the email. Reset the password because apparently you met this app once in 2019 during a different haircut. Add the card again. Accept the terms. Decline the marketing if the decline button is not hiding under a decorative fern. Update the app. Restart the app. Try again later.

No single step is worth a dramatic speech in the produce aisle. Pile them up across a week and you start to understand why everyone is tired in such a weird, boring way. It is admin sand. Grain by grain. Shoe by shoe. Somehow it gets into everything.

The dentist portal is a perfect specimen. You fill out the forms online because the reminder text says this will save time. You upload the insurance card. You answer the same medical questions you have answered since the Clinton administration. You arrive. The front desk asks for the insurance card again because the upload “doesn't always come through.” Then they hand you a tablet and ask you to sign with your finger, which turns every adult into a raccoon trying to authorize a mortgage. Later the portal sends a message to say a document is ready. You log in. The document says, in effect, that a document exists.

Time was not saved. It was moved around and made blue. That sentence could go on a lot of product decks if anyone were feeling brave. The tiny bosses are the part that really wears on me. Apps do not know how to leave. They linger after the errand is over, clearing their throats from the notification tray. Rate us. Enable alerts. Complete your profile. Your points expire soon. We miss you. Your cart is lonely. Your car needs an update. Your printer wants to discuss ink, because printers are born guilty and spend their lives proving it.

A toaster does not follow up. A chair does not ask if I enjoyed sitting. A spoon does not invite me to unlock premium stirring. But an app will, because the app has been taught that attention equals health. If I do not open the parking app for a month, the app may consider me inactive. I consider that a good month. I want a cold relationship with municipal parking. Polite. Distant. Mostly forgotten.

Instead, the phone becomes a small municipal committee. Prescription ready. Coupon available. Payment due. Storage full. Delivery delayed. Gate changed. Session expired. One-time code. Security alert. New sign-in from the device currently in your hand. Every square on the screen wants a crumb of attention. None of them seems greedy alone. Together they act like a civilization built out of needy clipboards.

And yes, convenience is real. That is why this is not clean. I like being able to deposit a check without driving to a branch. I like knowing whether the train is late before I stand on a platform in February pretending wind is character-building. I like digital tickets. I like maps. I like grocery pickup on the right day. Some apps deserve their square. Some. A good app behaves like a competent clerk. It remembers the useful thing. It asks for the minimum. It does not make itself the event. It gets you through the task and then steps aside.

A bad app behaves like a bored assistant manager with a clipboard. It blocks the doorway. It asks for information it does not need. It tells you something went wrong without saying what went wrong, which is less a message than a mood. It turns “buy soup” into “please complete your soup profile.” It stands there, smiling, while the thing you came for gets further away.

That is where businesses confuse digitizing the experience with improving it. A sandwich app should behave like a cashier. A parking app should behave like a meter with manners. A doctor portal should behave like a file cabinet that knows people are nervous. A thermostat app should act like a thermostat, not a tiny climate network with brand values.

Respect the noun. Lunch. Parking. Appointment. Bill. Ticket. Light. Ride. Form. The app should serve the noun. The app should not eat the noun and ask me to rate the flavor. The beige rectangle is the natural habitat of this problem. You know the beige rectangle even when it is white, blue, gray, charcoal, or wearing a cheerful brand color. It is the screen with fields, dropdowns, toggles, required uploads, optional uploads that are not optional, confirmations, tooltips, and the button marked Continue that may or may not continue anything.

A good form is a quiet miracle. It asks the right questions in the right order. It lets you finish. It does not treat your middle initial like a federal witness. It does not erase everything because your thumb brushed Back. It does not demand a PDF from a person standing in a hallway with one bar of service and a kid licking the sleeve of his own jacket.

A bad form is fog with boxes. A bad app is fog with branding. Under the fog, there is often another appetite. The counter knows what you bought. The app may know what you almost bought, when you hesitated, what coupon tempted you, where you were standing, how often you return, which device you use, and whether the word “exclusive” makes you behave. That may be valuable to the company. Fine. Say that. Do not wrap the whole exchange in lavender convenience smoke and act surprised when people cough.

The light bulb does not need my household rhythms. The laundromat does not need a membership identity. The frozen yogurt shop does not need a relationship map of my toppings. The car wash does not need to deepen engagement. Some businesses want an app because an app creates a channel back into the customer. That channel can be useful. It can also become a leash with coupons.

Access gets pinched, too. The best price is in the app. The coupon is in the app. The menu is behind the QR code. The receipt is in the account. Customer service begins with the chatbot, then the help article, then the second chatbot that uses warmer language, then maybe a human if you survive the maze with enough dignity left to describe the problem.

This setup quietly taxes anyone who is not perfectly equipped for app life. Older phone. Dead battery. Bad eyesight. Limited data. Shaky hands. Language barriers. Disability. Rain. Glare. A cracked screen. A person who is already carrying a child, groceries, worry, or all three.

A doorway is not accessible because it works on a designer's phone during a demo. A doorway is accessible when a tired person with 12 percent battery can still get through.

People create workarounds because they know this. We screenshot confirmations. We write down order numbers on envelopes. We take pictures of signs. We forward receipts to ourselves. We keep the name of the one support person who sounded like they had access to the actual machine and not the customer-facing puppet theater. We build little rafts around systems that were supposed to be boats.

That is not resistance to technology. That is folk engineering. Reliability is emotional. A green checkmark helps. A confirmation email helps. Still, nothing beats a competent person saying, “I see it here. You're all set.” Shoulders drop when that sentence lands. A system can be technically correct and still feel haunted. The airline app says on time while the gate agent is sweating through a blazer. I believe the sweat. Humans read the room because the room often knows before the app admits anything.

So no, the answer is not to toss every phone into the bay and bring back carbon copies as a civic religion. Nobody wants to spend Thursday waiting for Ron to find the binder. The answer is restraint.

Build the app when the app deserves to exist. Keep the guest path. Keep the website useful. Let the meter take a card. Let the sandwich be bought by a stranger. Put the menu where hungry people can see it. Give the QR code a printed backup. Let the unsubscribe button behave like it was raised in a decent home. Make the portal plain. Let the phone number reach a human eventually.

And stop calling every transfer of labor “convenience.” Care is not the presence of an interface. Care is the absence of needless strain. Care is a clear next step, a working fallback, a sentence that tells the truth, a path for the person who cannot or will not download one more thing before lunch. The best technology has humility. It does the job. It leaves room. It does not ask for affection. It knows when the relationship should end.

That is the note I keep coming back to, after the parking app, the portal, the coupon, the QR code, the fourth reset password, the tiny boss in my pocket clearing its throat. Use software where software helps. Use humans where humans help. Use a sign when a sign is enough. Use a form when a form is enough. Use an app when the app earns the square.

Convenience should feel like relief, not another thing asking to know me better.