Why does every app want to be everything?

Open enough applications and their menus begin to look alike. Writing software acquires tasks and databases. Social networks acquire shopping and payments. A storefront adds memberships and community tools. A game becomes a marketplace for the things its players create.

There is a joke about evolution repeatedly producing crabs. Software has its own recurring body plan: identities, relationships, content, search, coordination, transactions and now AI assistance. The metaphor is useful so long as we don't mistake it for a scientific law.

Two different forces create this resemblance. People really do need connected capabilities. Companies also benefit when customers never have to leave.

Imagine a historian collecting photographs for an exhibition. She needs permission from contributors, a catalogue, a publication, scheduling, discussion and perhaps ticket sales. The work really is connected. Forcing her through six unrelated applications is a poor expression of it.

The Notion template marketplace^{[1]Notion template marketplace} shows how an adaptable set of pages and databases becomes useful in ways the original toolmaker did not individually prescribe. Planners, editorial systems, learning tools and small-business workflows emerge from community-made patterns.

That is the compelling part of convergence: people can assemble capabilities that make sense for their own work.

IllustrationOne subject, different legitimate views

1. What happensEach app wants the whole user
2. What it missesInstitutions cannot move their work
3. What could changeCompose tools while retaining boundaries

If every product reproduces identity, messaging, permissions, file storage, AI, payments and reporting, people end up with contradictory copies. One organization's public price updates, but another service continues displaying the old price. A member's access is revoked in one system but survives in a linked workspace. Someone fixes a factual mistake and its earlier copies keep circulating.

A super-app can reduce the number of logins, but it can also move the entire problem inside one vendor's walls. Customers may have fewer choices about suppliers, data portability and presentation.

Instead of building everything into each app, we can ask which capabilities deserve to be shared. A product record can feed a store, a room plan and a procurement discussion; each has different permission to act. The record shouldn't be copied into three independent authorities.

A bakery needs production planning, ingredient stock and orders. A public archive needs attributed sources, collections and corrections. A music collective needs events, recordings, rights and merchandise.

No one generic dashboard will do justice to all three. Their shared operating needs are still considerable: identity, documents, members, publishing, communication, payments and constrained work.

Aurekai's aim is to reuse those foundations while letting each public experience take its own shape. ActivityPub^{[2]ActivityPub} demonstrates that systems can exchange social activity through a standard without becoming one company's software. It doesn't magically solve commerce or accounting, and that limitation matters.

The outcome we should want is not an app that contains everything, but an ecosystem in which small, comprehensible applications can participate in something larger.

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