Apps Are Like the Web, When They Want to Be
If you had to install updates to Facebook, do you think you’d use Facebook very long? Auto-updating fixes only part of the problem. Sure, we’ll get that feature one day, but the apps are still little islands of functionality that don’t talk to each other.
Auto-updating would fix the first problem. Web apps in a browser are essentially auto-updating with a shorter loop. I’m also constantly running into broken web apps and less frequently on my iPhone.
And apps can definitely talk to each other. On iOS you can register protocol handlers and use them effectively as hyperlinks between apps. Windows 8 has sharing contracts. Android has intents. Windows Phone 7 has…nevermind. I get links to apps in emails and from web sites all the time. You can go back and forth. It’s a solved problem, developers just need to implement it.