The age of the app is over.

Arc is an incredible browser. I replaced Chrome with Arc three years ago and I use it more than any other software. It's a masterclass in interface design. So when its makers announced this week that they were abandoning Arc to work on another browser (Dia), I was curious.

tl;dr They’re going all in on AI agents:

“Imagine writing an essay justifying why you were moving on from your candle business at the dawn of electric light. Electric intelligence is here — and it would be naive of us to pretend it doesn’t fundamentally change the kind of product we need to build to meet the moment.”

I love The Browser Company’s design philosophy. Two years ago, they argued that apps were too constraining for modern knowledge work: “We think in projects, goals, and people. So why are our smartphones built around apps?”

That argument has been anchored in my mind, because the way we work digitally seems tedious: tabbing between pages, tabbing between apps, opening and closing them like physical filing cabinets. We use pieces of an app. And we need to be able to tear those pieces out of our apps and bring it all together and get our work done.

Agents make this a reality.

One of the things that makes agents “smarter” than LLMs is their ability to use tools. Agents can swiftly navigate any app or tool to get us the outputs we need, without us having to mess around with an app’s menus and buttons.

What will these new interfaces look like? It won’t be chat. That’s just a bridge to something more fluid and dynamic. But there are some emerging patterns:

• Flowchart builders with nodes and connectors (n8n)
• Open canvas like Miro and Figma
• Auto-generated wizards with variable steps
• On-the-fly UI

Our existing UIs won’t go away just yet, but they will become relics, like the stack of CD-ROMs I found while spring cleaning with no devices left to read them.

“Traditional browsers, as we know them, will die. Much in the same way that search engines and IDEs are being reimagined. That doesn’t mean we’ll stop searching or coding. It just means the environments we do it in will look very different, in a way that makes traditional browsers, search engines, and IDEs feel like candles — however thoughtfully crafted. We’re getting out of the candle business. You should too.”

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P.S. Here’s The Browser Company’s full essay: https://browsercompany.substack.com/p/letter-to-arc-members-2025

P.P.S. And here’s their argument for why The Age of the App is Over: https://browsercompany.substack.com/p/the-age-of-the-app-is-over