Bots won't replace apps. Better apps will replace apps.

But the more articles I read on the topic, the more annoyed I get. It's taken me so long to figure out why! Conversations, writes WIRED, can do things traditional GUIs can't. Matt Hartman equates the surge in text-driven apps as a kind of "hidden homescreen". TechCrunch says "forget apps, now bots take over". The creator of Fin thinks it's a new paradigm all apps will move to. Dharmesh Shah wonders whether the rise of conversational UI will be the downfall of designers. Design, says Emmet Connolly at Intercom is a conversation. Benedict Evans prophecized that the new lay of the land is "all messaging expands until it includes software." "People don't want apps for every single business that you interact with," says David Marcus, head of Facebook Messenger, "…just have a message within a nicely designed bubble … [that's a] much nicer experience than an app." Under his charge, Facebook Messenger has tested this approach, building integrations with high profile partners as well as opening up a bot API. We've even seen avant-garde attempts at taking this idea to its extreme, like Quartz's latest app, which presents the news as a conversation, or the game Lifeline. Apps like Mailtime even promise to save us from our emails by turning them into chats. I guess I might be partially to blame for this, with a few pieces citing a section in a 2014 piece of mine that I literally titled "Chats as Universal UI."