Have you ever noticed how many web apps seem similar? You hear about a new file sharing or project management app, and it’s so similar to the last one you heard about, you can’t hardly tell the difference. Sure, it has more free space, or better integration with another obscure app, but at the end of the day, it’s not essentially different.
Is this what web apps are doomed to? Can web app only be created for a few select tasks, with no room for innovation and brand new types of apps?
Too Many Similar Apps
Our team gets requests to review dozens of different web apps every week, and we publish 5-10 articles weekly about new or freshly updated web apps we think are great. With all of those new apps, you’d think that you’d find a great variety of different apps that solve a wide range of problems. And thankfully, you do come across quite a few apps that are new and exciting, or set the bar higher for their respective category of apps.
But more often than not, the apps we come across are strikingly similar to other apps. Each platform has its own type of apps that are way too common. Angry Bird copycats on the iPhone, or task managers on Android, or writing apps on the Mac are all so common that you can shake a stick and hit a dozen of them in their respective app stores. With Linux, there’s so many distributions of the OS itself, normal users can’t figure out which to run. And the browser wars continue today, but new versions of each browser often feel like they’re only adding the features their competitors added last time around.
For web apps, project management and invoicing apps are easily the most common; there must be a million out there. I love productivity apps, and enjoy trying out new task and project managers. We’ve seen some great innovation in this space over the past year, and there’s plenty of very unique task managers online today. But dozens of project managers are essentially the same. They’ve taken the exact same idea as every other project manager, implemented them with their own barely-tweaked UI, and launched it onto an unsuspecting public as though it’s a brand new app. Half the apps you come across, it seems, use a variant of Basecamp’s original interface, and now we’re seeing so many apps based on Twitter’s Bootstrap, it’s unreal.
It gets tough after a while to get excited about yet another app that does the very same thing in the very same way. Just like it’s tough to pick out an Android Phone or PC today because of the minute differences in each devices, it’s often very difficult to pick out a web app for a certain task because there’s so many that are so very similar. Developers decide instead to make apps that essentially have the same features and similar design as existing successful apps, and they end up feeling much like generic products at superstores.
It’s not that these apps can’t be used for real work. They absolutely can. But, they’re overall not adding anything of value to the ecosystem, and it’s sad to see new apps coming out that add nothing new to the world of web apps.
It’s time to start creating unique apps that solve new problems. Find areas that aren’t being solved with web apps, and make ingenious new apps that will make people’s lives easier. We’ve got dozens of teams working on managing projects and taking notes, syncing files and making invoices. Let’s move on to the next levels, and find new areas for web apps to conquer.
But sometimes, old apps do need reinvented
Then again, it’s hard to say you should never make a new app that does the same thing as another app. Gmail wasn’t hardly the first online email app when it launched in 2004; Hotmail had already been online for nearly a decade at that point. But with new features and vastly more storage than any other webmail service, it quickly rewrote the rules for email and because the most popular email service around the globe. And nearly a decade later, new services like Shortmail and Fluent.io are trying to rewrite the rules of the email game again.
It’s not that email, project management, invoicing, or any other task can’t be made better or reinvented. The problem is, so many apps do the same functions in the same way. There’s a real potential to reinvent interfaces and make the same workflow much simpler, as 37signals proved with their New Basecamp. Or take Dropbox as an example. Many people thought file sharing was a done deal, and couldn’t be improved. Then Dropbox came along, and entirely reset our expectations for what file syncing and sharing should really be. They’ve turned that into a valuable cash cow, just like 37signals did with their original Basecamp and undoubtedly will with its new iteration.
What we need is developers and designers who will think through the toughest tasks, or even the simplest tasks that take up users times. Break these down into steps, and think of intuitive ways to make them simpler. Then, make new apps that bring better workflows and ideas together with solid backend coding and great design. And you know what? Even if it does the same basic thing as other apps, we won’t even think to compare the two since your app will feel different from the start.
Let us take a stand
There’s the challenge: make apps that fit needs that no other apps fit, or make apps that do things other apps are already doing in such a better way that we’ll never think to compare the two. We’re ready for new, amazing apps that will set the standard for the next generation of apps and the inevitable copycats that will follow. Don’t be the ones creating the copycats. Be the ones they’re trying to emulate. Set the standard. Be bold.
After all, if we’re bold enough to have already moved our lives onto the cloud, we can surely be bold enough to try out radically new apps and interface designs.