I opened Bloons TD the other day to play a quick round.
3 modals appeared before I could see the homescreen. Daily challenge banner. Season pass popup. Currency reward to claim. New event to dismiss. Upgrade pack offer. Settings nag.
I closed the app without playing.
It is a tower defense game. I wanted to place towers and pop bloons. That used to be the whole loop. Now the loop is wrapped in five other loops, and the original one is buried somewhere underneath.
This is not a Bloons problem. This is every app I open.
Banking app: a credit card promo before my balance.
Streaming app: three rows of recommendations before search.
Food delivery: a wall of paid placement before the restaurants I actually order from.
Social app: a story tray, a creator subscription pitch, an explore feed, a "see what your friends are up to" prompt.
The actual product is buried. The shell around it has eaten the product.
The framing rotted. Engagement is the metric, not job-completed. Every quarter another team gets staffed, another OKR gets set, another ribbon of UI gets stapled on top. Nobody is paid to remove anything. The apps grow rings like trees.
I cannot fix Bloons TD. I can fix what I ship.
From now on, every app I build does exactly one thing. No accounts. No settings screens. No upsells. No notifications. No "while you're here, why don't you also."
My dictation app is one screen and one button. Tap, talk, the words land in your clipboard. There are no settings. There is no account. There is no history view. There is no premium tier. The whole app is the thing it does.
The next one is a local events app. Same shape. Open it, see what is happening tonight, close it. No social feed. No RSVPs. No friend system. No login.
The argument is real, not just a vibe.
A one-feature app ships in a weekend. A ten-feature app takes a year, half of which is plumbing between features. Users understand a one-feature app instantly because there is nothing to learn. The bug surface is small because there is barely any surface. And the constraint forces the work into the part that matters, because there are no escape valves to hide in.
If you have felt the same fatigue lately, opening apps that used to be useful and now feel like a department store, you are not imagining it. The apps actually did get worse.
Some of us are going the other way.
