What an OS Without Apps Really Means?
An Operation System Without Apps is a concept that people can’t wrap thier heads around when I first mention it. Patially because it is contradictory to the definition of OS hence confusing, but no one named this concept better. As confusing as it may be it only means an approach to the interface design and it doen’t mean that the system has no apps.
Actually the idea is simple. It means that to the end user everything he would need is integrated into an operation system. We have good examples - in your phone you have a lot of the seemlessly integrated apps like “Contacts”, “Messages”, “Calls”, etc.
First company who tried to implement this concept was Apple. Most of the applications made for MacOS or iOS follow strict design rules and feel as part of the environment, at least visually.
Google’s ChromeOS is also a good example but with a different approach - they leverage cloud and sell thier own services.
In both cases the goal was to implement vertical integration for their products and services, which is easier to do when third party apps work as part of thier own product. There’s of course an obvious flaw in this approach - the developers don’t want to give up their work to the monopolies. This is why Apple haven’t achieved this goal and Google’s ChromeOS has a poor ecosystem limited to the web.
An Operation System Without Apps
The idea as I see it is very simple. Such OS would be basically a big application that can do everything. As an example you can take a file manager in any OS, but imagine that it can do more with files. Wanna edit an image? - the editor opens right in the file manager environment. Instead of opening a window you navigate to the action. This already exists on mobile devices so it is easy to understand.
Of course it means that such a system has to use another approach to multitasking, ui file management and other important things.
In a sense, a web browser could be considered such an interface if we drop the fact that every web app has its own design code. And some people say that generative AI can bring this idea to reality, but I disagree because one-dimentional unterfaces like CLI or chats have a slow interaction pace. What is easier - taping 3 buttons on calculator or writing a query to Chat GPT?
What about the apps?
As I said, the idea is about the interface but not about the applications. In fact, it is easier to develop an application without worrying about the UI elements and navigation. An application becomes integrated part of OS which makes it easier for the end user. For a developer the problem could be that the ownership is inderectly transfered to the OS. So such a system should be either an opensource project or provide a clear way to manage ownership.
This is only a concept
On paper this idea looks nice, but in reality it is hard to achieve. I mentioned only a couple of problems. Even Apple & Google could not achieve it. Apple had a chance though.
It is however a nice concept to play with when desigining your own product and looking at it from the user’s perspective.
Peace ✌️