Will Messaging Bots Eat Mobile Apps? We Ask Uber's Chris Messina

Facebook wants developers everywhere to build bots for 900 million people on the Messenger Platform, Quartz's first news app is built on a bot-like conversational paradigm, and a UX designer just built his personal website as a chat bot. Why are bots so hot, and will all apps go the messaging route? We asked Uber's developer experience lead -- and the inventor of the social-media hashtag -- Chris Messina: The idea of mobile, Messina says, is that you are connected wherever you go. But mobile app user interfaces, even those designed as mobile-first from the bottom up, still tend to rely on metaphors that we developed for desktop computing 30 years ago. A big part of that desktop metaphor is an assumption: some degree of immersion over time in a task.