Apps Become Back-Ends for Assistants
Sam Hall, CEO of Wafer, on AI agent form factors
The center of gravity shifts from app screens to app access. If an assistant becomes the place where a user decides, compares, and acts, the winning apps are no longer the ones with the prettiest interface, but the ones that expose the most useful inventory, identity, pricing, and transaction hooks to the operating system. In that world, Uber, LinkedIn, and Spotify still matter, but more as systems the assistant reads from and writes into than destinations users open directly.
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Android already points in this direction. App Actions let developers declare specific capabilities so Google Assistant can launch into app functions, and Apple has a parallel App Intents layer. The constraint is that assistants can only do what developers explicitly expose, which makes the experience narrow until deeper OS level access or broader developer support arrives.
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This changes app design incentives. Consumer apps still need proprietary supply and graph assets, like drivers in Uber or profiles in LinkedIn, but their moat increasingly sits in unique data and reliable action endpoints, not extra tabs and notifications. Wafer describes this as apps turning into back ends, and Perplexity and Manus show the market moving upstream to the interface layer that captures intent first.
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The likely split is between entertainment apps and utility apps. Entertainment products like TikTok still benefit from a native feed because the content itself is the experience. Utility apps, like travel booking, messaging, commerce, and scheduling, are more likely to be atomized into assistant callable functions because users care about the outcome, not which screen delivered it.
Over the next five years, the app ecosystem is likely to look more like a mix of APIs, intent handlers, and lightweight interfaces sitting behind a few dominant assistants, browsers, and AI native operating systems. The biggest product win will be owning user intent at the top layer, while the biggest app win will be becoming the default system of record that those assistants trust to fulfill actions.