One app to rule them all, and the AI to bind them.
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Silicon Valley has spent years obsessing over "super apps" that can do it all. AI is powering a new version of that dream.Just take Google, which last week did the most Google thing it could: it killed a product.This wasn't your textbook Google assassination. The company announced it was axing its new AI Studio app — a mobile companion to its AI developer playground — before it even launched, despite 800,000 people having pre-installed it.The decision came with an explanation: rather than asking users to download yet another app, Google said it wanted to take an approach "where apps emerge naturally, in the course of your everyday conversations with Gemini." In other words, it's going to combine AI Studio into Google's main Gemini app.Google is just the latest example of a company moving from many products to an app that can do it all. AI is central to this strategy.Microsoft's 'super app' plan OpenAI has been talking about this a lot lately. Last month, it launched a new agent that combines its chat and work functions, named ChatGPT Work. It also killed its Atlas browser and said it would migrate some of the functions into the ChatGPT app. Anthropic also recently announced it would merge Claude chat and Cowork.Microsoft's at it, too. CEO Satya Nadella said on the company's recent earnings call that the company would combine Copilot's function into what he explicitly described as a "super app." (Even Disney reportedly wants in, although not for AI purposes)
