Where Are The Invisible Apps?

About a year ago, an article was published which gave a description of a new mobile app that was termed as the Invisible App at that time. This article was written by Matthew Panzarino who made a prediction that there will an increase in the number of apps that would be living in the background and be working on sensors as well as data and literally we will be able to do carry out things without even asking us.

Now, this was considered as an awesome vision at that time. The recent trends are clearly moving towards the invisible app. With the mobile phones coming with more number of sensors and components are becoming smaller in size making them faster as well as accurate. They are now having less battery usage. Today some of the latest smartphones comes with nearly 10 sensors allowing the user to detect things easily.

Today our computer has the ability to access data from worldwide but it can also understand what the user is feeling or doing at certain point of time. They can understand and detect whatever is happening around the user. Here comes the Apple Watch which indicates that the vision of Matthew was likely to come true in the coming future.

This device made use of all the sensor-intelligence expected from invisible apps but is conveniently displayed by the users on the wrist. But it has been more than 8 years and no one has heard anything about an app which can detect that the user is hungry and order out the food immediately.

Why there is a delay? 

With phones getting smarter each day with increasing number of sensors, we still cannot understand why there are no apps being built who can anticipate our requirements. The very first limitation that will be encountered by the makers of the invisible app will be the privacy factor since the app will require sensitive and personal data that needed to be treated carefully. With increasing security concerns, many users are not comfortable sharing their data with the apps.

This will become a roadblock for the makers to build any app giving required experiences. Sensors as if now have been claimed to be consuming less power but with the invisible app coming into existence, it is easy to anticipate that it will require more power to function. If the sensors are used in the background of the app, there could be considerably lower impact of the batter life. It is not easy for every developer to collection and analyse the raw data and make it into something useful and be part of the intelligence. Huge numbers of data points are required for carrying out this function.

Despite all this, we can still believe that these apps are about to come into existence. In order to get the first piece built, developers will have to cross over hurdles like infrastructure, privacy as well as technical issues. All these are moving us towards making ourselves more efficient as well as productive.