Jason Snell on Six Colors: Preparing for the Era of Orchestrated Apps

When everything is orchestrated properly, all the capabilities of all your apps are put into a big soup, and the AI system at the heart of your device can choose the right capabilities to do what you need it to do—without you having to specify all the steps it needs to take to get there.

I really hope this initiative works out for Apple. There have been a few times where they’ve introduced features that are supposed to abstract away our app-centric usage of the iPhone, and to expose functions from inside apps around the iOS system (pull up Spotlight on your iPhone right now and you’ll see some quick actions you probably ignore 99.9% of the time). Each time it seems the app-centric model of…

1. Find app
2. Tap app icon
3. Do thing in the app
4. Leave the app

…has proven to be exceptionally resilient.

Watching Apple’s WWDC demos of Apple Intelligence, I too had my brain racing with the concept of just asking my phone to do things and have it go into apps and services to get it done, but I also can’t help but feel like we’ve been here before and a couple years from now I’ll still be opening apps just like I do today. We’ll see, though, maybe this time we are going to get a real shake up to our usage patterns. Like I said in My (not so) brief thoughts on WWDC 2024, 24 hours later, it’s hard to say too much about how all this Apple Intelligence stuff is going to work until we actually use it, so I’m very excited to see this hit the betas sometime later this year.