Mass-produced Software
In software right now, there’s this strange, lingering sense that you’ve seen it all before. You open the app store, scroll for a bit, and it hits you. Every other app is a compression tool, or a task manager, or a notes app. All of them doing the same thing, just dressed slightly different. One might look cleaner, one might promise more features, one might charge a subscription for something that should have been free.
Some add in a new button, some just rebrand. Some exist only to collect your data. And they all want the same thing. Attention. Growth. A chance to be the version you pick when you’re tired of the last one.
It’s the same thing that happened to physical products. Someone comes up with a good idea, something useful, something clever, and not long after, you see five more just like it. The same shape, the same colors, just a little worse each time. Built faster, built cheaper. Because that’s what works. That’s what sells. And over time, the original thing, the thing that felt like it mattered, gets buried under copies that only cared about keeping up.
This is what the Industrial Revolution taught us to do. Build things fast. Build them cheap. Get them into the hands of as many people as possible. And in a lot of ways, that was a good thing. It made things more accessible. It made products that were once rare feel common. It made comfort available to more than just a few.
But it also introduced something else. A kind of numbness. A kind of mass sameness. Where the purpose became production. And the craft started to disappear.
You can see it now in software. The same kind of repetition. The same kind of rush.
Jony Ive once said,
“I believe we sense when there’s been care taken with a product, just in the same way we sense carelessness.”
You don’t need a design degree to know when something feels off. You can tell. Even if you don’t have the words for it. It’s the difference between something that stays with you, and something you close and never think about again.
Most apps now feel like they were made to launch. Not to last.
That’s the real problem. Not that they don’t work. But that they don’t mean anything. They don’t carry any thought past the first interaction.
It usually starts with a solid idea. Something basic, something useful. It gets built quickly, it works, people like it. Then someone else sees it. Then another. And before long, it’s the same product, copied in different colors, with just enough variation to be called new.
Ive said it again, in another way:
“Most of our manufactured environment testifies to a degree of carelessness. It testifies to, like, ‘Get it built fast, make it cheap, make it look different.’”
That’s where most of today’s software lives. Look at something simple, like compression tools. Same algorithms, same results. Some of them free, some of them paid. Some of them with better branding, or shinier interfaces. But once you strip the surface away, they’re all doing the same thing. Nobody’s trying to push it forward. They’re just filling a slot.
But again, mass production isn’t the enemy. Ive also said,
“You can make something in high volume with incredible care, and obviously, vice versa.”
And he’s right. The Industrial Revolution didn’t have to kill design. It just shifted our attention. From care, to consistency. From meaning, to metrics. You can still make something beautiful at scale. You just have to care.
Care is what people remember. It’s what they can feel. In how a product opens. In how it waits. In how it moves. You can feel when someone gave it attention. You can feel when someone tried.
But now, software is fast. It’s iterative. It’s metrics-first. And the result is that everything starts to blur. The same colors. The same gestures. The same icons. The same empty feeling.
Nobody wants to stick out the wrong way. That’s part of the issue too. When everything looks the same, anything that breaks the pattern feels like it’s wrong. Like it’s trying too hard. Like it’s unfinished. But it’s not always wrong to be different. It’s not always bad to care about the feeling of something.
Some companies still manage it. They follow the system, but they sneak something in. A moment. A mood. A surprise. Something that wasn’t in the rules but still feels right.
That’s the kind of software that’s worth making. Not because it’s louder or weirder or more complicated. But because it makes people feel something again.
You don’t need to reinvent everything. You don’t need to reject every rule. You just need to put the feeling back.
Feeling is the part we keep leaving out. Feeling is the part that makes people stay.
And right now, most software is missing it. But it doesn’t have to be.
You can always tell when someone didn’t care.
And you can always tell when they did.