Dan Grover | Bots won't replace apps. Better apps will replace apps.

recent “bot-mania” is at the confluence of two separate trends... agent AIs steadily getting better... the US somehow still hasn’t got a dominant messaging app and Silicon Valley is trying to learn from the success of Asian messenger apps...
The thesis, then, is that users will engage more frequently, deeply, and efficiently with third-party services if they’re presented in a conversational UI instead of a separate native app... seems a major misattribution of what makes chat apps work and what problems they’re best at solving... Not only is “conversational UI” a red herring, but as we look more closely, we’ll even see places where conversational UI has breached its limits and broken down... To be fair, it’s still surprising the range of apps and services that can be shoehorned into a chat-style UI...
see WeChat and its ilk not as SMS replacements but as nascent visions of a mobile OS whose UI paradigm is, rather than rigidly app-centric, thread-centric (and not, strictly speaking, conversation-centric).