It’s been a while since I wrote an article about one-task applications, so I want to talk about life and why I decided to write this. If you want to skip it, just proceed to the first header.
I was quite busy these days, but not because I was a productivity monster working on a business idea that could make me rich (I was working on a mobile app though). The main reason I wasn’t writing was simple: first, burnout; secondly, I was distracted by social media and my phone.
Actually, this article is alive thanks to social media and my poor management with my phone. The title might feel a bit tricky, so you might already be thinking about what one-task applications are.
I don’t want to fill your head with my nonsense life, so let’s get back to the topic.
What is a one-task app?
What I mean by one-task apps are the legacy apps we all had before. Do you remember when WhatsApp was just for messaging? Back then all apps had a clear purpose, so I call these one-task apps. WhatsApp? Messaging. Instagram? Social media, share your photos. Twitter? Share your text. Bla bla.
But now every app wants to keep you in the application, so they try to offer everything in one place.
Two weeks ago, before I let go of my phone, I was completely distracted all the time, and the biggest reason was Instagram. I could chat with my friends, watch reels, share stories, share photos, edit my profile, bla bla. Too much stuff I never needed.
Of course, this isn’t an article telling you to give up your phone, get your life back, and change it miraculously. It’s an article about why we should develop one-task apps for the sake of security and user happiness.
Why one-task apps?
I was developing a news app and the only aim was publishing the app. A news app is not that hard to build if you already have a website with an API endpoint.
I sat down and wrote everything I wanted in my application: profiles, categories, read later, history, author pages, an algorithm, bla bla.
I couldn’t finish the app – no need to lie here. It’s easy to list everything you want, but reality hits hard once you start developing.
But I also noticed something: does a user really need everything I listed, or am I adding those features just because I can (I couldn’t, though)?
Also, I didn’t want to mess with user privacy, because if I created a login page I’d need to store their data on my web servers and encrypt it on my side at least.
Everything I listed was doable, but it required extra effort and might lead to unnecessary security breaches and user dissatisfaction.
So I decided to cut the list down and removed around 50 features – no cap. What I kept was simple: news on the homepage, a saved articles page, one more page for a new news format, a search button, and categories. That’s it.
Yes, it’s just basic website features, but a convenient version for mobile users.
Benefits
It took me two weeks to complete the app. I sent it to a friend to test and his first response was: “That’s it?”
He was expecting more, which is understandable. But he read at least two articles, and because the app wasn’t bloated, he actually took his time to read them.
To test further, I built some extra features; avatars and an AI chat; and asked him to test the app for a day when he had time.
I checked what he was doing and he wasn’t even reading articles. He was just using the AI chatbot to ask unnecessary questions about a single article.
Totally he read seven articles in a day in the first app and only two in the second. He told me it was easier to focus on the news when there was no AI button floating in the corner.
It was good for me too, because the code was easier to maintain and more secure. Almost no user data was stored on my web server – just simple HTTPS requests.
I didn’t need to pay for a database service or a huge AWS bill thanks to this approach.
But of course, it’s not a big win for companies that are starving for data.
Why big companies will never build one-task apps
The easy and simple answer: they are starving for data, and it’s not easy to gather data if you’re focused on a single purpose. If you don’t store user data on your servers, it’s impossible to analyze it.
My application was built simple because dealing with mobile security scared me. If something is simple, it’s much more secure.
Smaller attack surface is always more convenient. But because big companies will never build these apps because profit over satisfaction is the key for those businesses.
If we make everything simple and purposeful, you can’t waste your time so easily, and spending less time on an app means fewer interactions, which leads to less ad revenue.
Instagram, YouTube, and other apps make money primarily through advertising or premium models. These are the two most convenient ways to generate revenue. One-task mobile apps undermine the first approach because their purpose is to solve a problem and give users their time back, not to create a time-consuming loop driven by an algorithm. You can build a one-task app using the second approach , a premium model, but that still requires adding extra features (which may be unnecessary long-term) to entice users, and you might end up restricting access to features that are essential to solving the problem.
So one task per app is not effective for big corporations, and they won’t build for the sake of solving our problems and giving our time back to us.
Conclusion
The philosophy of one task per app is just something personal and fulfilling for me.
It’s good to develop apps for people. There was a motto back then: you should solve people’s problems with technology. But right now we’re actually creating more problems with our apps.
Story games, for example – they don’t give you stress like online competitive games. No battle pass, no bullshit, no ranks, just chilling and vibing. Their purpose is telling a story in an interactive way, unlike soulless competitive games.
The way I embrace this approach is not just for the sake of others but also for myself. It was much easier to publish the app that way when I didn’t need to focus on encrypting data in transit and at rest, or on adding AI to my app and wasting my AI tokens.
If you’re a developer, just consider starting a simple project with a single purpose and see if it really benefits anyone and you.