Hampus Jakobsson presented a fantastic talk at this year’s MEX conference about the “wild west” gold rush mentality surrounding mobile app stores. Hampus warned most players in the mobile space are merely mimicking Apple’s model, leaving many user experience challenges that hinder the app store experience unaddressed. This talk inspired a host of great discussions about many of the fundamental user experience issues that plague app stores and ways to improve the process through design.

However, Hampus’ talk brought focus to a question that’s been lingering on my mind for a while now. As the once innovative app store strategy quickly becomes “hygiene” for many in mobile, I can’t help but wonder if all this fast follower behavior is an incremental step to something much bigger.

What if the real problem with app stores doesn’t stem from Apple’s ridiculous application approval process, scalability problems, or mediocre social recommendation functionality? What if the real problem with app stores is what they are selling?

What if the real problem is the notion of applications on mobile phones?

Applications as a means for both expressing and manipulating information in a mobile context is an interaction model we’ve borrowed wholesale from the PC. While application stores have solved many issues - ease in application development, downloading applications to a device, payment - it’s easy to forget the application model was originally developed for a fundamentally different context. A static context.

What if we haven’t figured out how to accurately express information in a mobile context and we are simply borrowing the wrong model?

I’ve been thinking a lot these days about the notion expression - how artists, engineers and designers have used creative models and methods to express information, points of view, and the possibilities of their time - and moments when breakthroughs around creative expression have occurred.

The web is a great example of inventing new models and methods to express information.

Back in the days of “Web 1.0” the internet was a vast and unexplored frontier, ripe with untapped potential. While the internet provided an entirely new way for people to access, distribute, and experience information, in 1996 nobody really knew how to create “web experiences” that unlocked that potential.

Legions of print designers applied their knowledge of graphic design and print design to the Internet, giving rise to the phenomenon of brochureware. Some designers applied immersive spatial metaphors to the web, like the famed SouthWest Airlines homepage circa 1996. And who can forget those web sites where pages had the look and feel of pages from a book. Regardless of the model, the strategy was similar; borrowing. We first borrowed models we understood, found our footing and were then able to invent new and more sophisticated ways to express information in a this new context of the web.

Art movements have followed a similar arc. A favorite example was the transition between Medieval and Renaissance Art.

A defining characteristic of Medieval art was it’s lack of dimensionality. Artisans from the Middle Ages hadn’t figured out how to represent form in perspective. Subsequently the work was highly symbolic and representational. It remains valuable and interesting work. However, from an art-making perspective, Medieval art is a study in abstraction. Artisans from the Medieval period lacked the art making methods to represent form in the way humans visually perceive it. 

In contrast, Renaissance art celebrated the discovery of perspective techniques such as foreshortening, chiaroscuro and the use of balance and proportion in the art-making process. Artists like Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael became masters of depicting form in a way that closely mirrored how humans perceive it. Humans were always able to perceive volume and spatial relationships, but it wasn’t until artists of the Renaissance discovered and honed perspective techniques that artwork reflected these qualities.

Data is similar to physical form in that it has perspective. We think about it along lines of place, time, and social dimensions… yet mobile applications rarely allow us to truly experience the multi-dimensional aspects of information. Instead, similar to Medieval art, mobile applications flatten data. Users are forced to either burrow deeply into single application or pogo stick across a host of lightweight applications, often with no through lines for the data. As we begin to prism data through more and more devices - televisions, car dashboards, screens in public spaces -  the application model becomes brittle. It locks us into a way of thinking about information that doesn’t accurately represent the multi-dimensional ways we perceive and use it.

What if the app stores and “wild west” application development we’re seeing today in the mobile space is a re-enactment of the evolution of the web? What if mobile applications we download through Apple’s app store are the “brochureware” of what we will experience five years from now? What if applications are a borrowed and broken model we’ll ride out until the “perspective techniques” of data representation and manipulation in a mobile context are discovered and celebrated.

If applications go away, what will replace them? Compelling data visualizations? Adaptive interfaces? I’m not sure, but I’m curious to hear your thoughts…