The Selfish App and Which App Will Survive in the Ecosystem

by Johnny TheDoc on 27/09/2011

Imagine a world where applications are struggling together with other apps to survive in their ecosystem.

Which apps will survive?

article by Christian H. Leeb, CVO Wappwolf Inc.

The answer is quite simple. Each app that managed to be used and built in actions together with other apps, will have a chance. All other apps, which are not used or seen or built in actions, will disappear.
Therefore it is necessary for the app to change its behavior to the needs, to be liked and recommended by humans and avatars.

I am talking of the evolution of apps, the app population, mutation and selection, the same principles as Charles Darwin found out for life.

If you look at apps now they are living as protozoon in several app stores, e.g. Apple’s. That is pretty good for the first years of the evolution of apps like it was for the beginning of life. But this is not the end, or to be precise: this could be the end for that type of apps, becoming a side branch of evolution, but it is not the end for app evolution in general.

I personally believe that the real side branch is the population of large applications that you have to download and maintain on your computer. The reason is that the ecosystem, necessary for this type of applications, will not exist in the future. There will be no devices with operating systems to host fat programs any more. And there will be no humans doing that boring job any more.

So, the living conditions for these applications will become worse till it is only a niche somewhere on the planet. Maybe we will found some zoo for those ancient applications where our kids can watch them, or they will completely disappear from earth like dinosaurian did millions of years before.

But the evolution of apps will go further. Metazoans will become the trend of app evolution. Each single app will be a specialist and together they will solve a problem as a single action. Apps and combined apps to actions will change due to the needs and demands in the ecosystem. So, it seems as if the pressure of the users, of humans will influence the survival of apps and actions. Well, this is only one part of the answer. I will come back to that later.

Do you know Richard Dawkins? He is a British evolutionary biologist and author. He popularised the gene-centered view of evolution and introduced the term meme. A gene changes an organism according to the ecosystem. If you are interested in that theory including the explanation of many phenomena, you should read his popular book ‘The Selfish Gene’. Here you will also find his idea of the meme, which is any piece of information. A Meme also tries to survive in the ecosystem, but the ecosystem is not the sum of the cells of organisms, but the sum of all the brains of organisms. Great idea! So, keep in mind that not the humans are in the centre of evolution! We are just helping memes to survive.

Now, I am coming back to our question, what is influencing the survival of apps. My answer is: No humans. That would again be the egocentric view of humans. But if you are an app, you will see that the influence is done by the documents processed by the app.  The documents will force apps to change. They will force the sequence of apps, they will force that some apps will be replaced by better apps in actions, and so on. We humans are just helping the apps doing their job: to survive.

Of course, this only will work if the right ecosystem is in place. That is exactly what Wappwolf is doing. Wappwolf has the ecosystem where documents will be automatically processed by actions consisting of apps. And Wappwolf is giving humans the possibility to vote and recommend in order to help those apps to survive. Damn! The selfish apps will do it. And who knows: Maybe the apps will try to leave other ecosystems like Apple’s app store to get a better chance to be successful.


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