How many apps do you open per day? iOS has a feature that will tell you: Screen Time → See All Activity → Pickups. Mine last week was a hundred and forty-seven. That's about one unlock every seven minutes of waking time.
I want to introduce a category that resists that number: the app you never open.
There is a kind of app, and it's the kind I am trying to build, whose job is best done outside of itself. A weather app, ideally, is a glance at a complication and a widget. A utility-meter reader, ideally, is a lock-screen notification when your bill spikes. A gift card wallet, ideally, is a banner on your lock screen that says $14, you're here and nothing else. If those apps do their job, you rarely have to open them, because the job was already done by the time you noticed.
This is a strange ambition. Most apps are trying to be opened more; mine is trying to be opened less. But I've come to believe that for a category of utility apps, this is the only correct ambition. The people who use a gift-card app are not there to browse gift cards. They are there to use one. The less friction between "I have cards" and "I used one," the better the app. The best possible version is the one where the app is barely present, because the surface it works through, the lock screen, the Dynamic Island, the Watch, the CarPlay screen, is already there.
iOS, over the last five years, has quietly become an extraordinary substrate for this. Apple has been building, without saying so out loud, a whole second layer of the iPhone experience that does not live inside individual apps. The lock screen got Live Activities. The Watch got complications. The Dynamic Island got its whole own vocabulary. CarPlay got interactive notifications. Shortcuts got App Intents. Siri got system-level app awareness. Spotlight got deep linking into specific app states.
For a long time, most apps treated these as "extensions", optional surfaces you'd build someday when you had time. I've come to think they are not extensions. For a certain kind of app, they are the primary UI, and the app window itself is the fallback. You build the Watch complication, the Live Activity, the Shortcut, and the Widget first, because that's where the user will actually encounter the product. You build the app screen last, because it's only for the 2% of interactions that can't be done anywhere else.
Cue is designed this way. If you never open the app after your first scan, that's fine, the app was built to live on your lock screen, your Watch face, the Dynamic Island, and the CarPlay cluster. The wallet view is mostly there for the "let me see all my cards at once" moment, which honestly is rare.
The architectural word for this, if you want to get technical, is ambient. A good ambient app shows up where you are, the Watch on your wrist, the car screen while you're driving, the lock screen while your phone is face-up on the counter, and quietly contributes to the moment. The Ecosystem Intelligence press kit gets into how the specific integrations work (Live Activities, App Intents, SiriKit, CarPlay CPTemplate, WidgetKit, etc.). For this post the framework names are less important than the posture.
The posture is where you already are.
When you're on the couch, the app is on your phone's lock screen, quietly, and Focus mode probably has it suppressed anyway. When you're walking into a store, the app is a banner that appears one second before you push the door open. When you're driving, the app is either a silent indicator in CarPlay or nothing at all, because the app knows driving is not the moment to ask you to interact. When you're at the register, the app is the barcode on your screen and nothing else. When you're in a meeting, the app is absent, because you have Focus on, and Focus is the loudest signal a user can give an app, and Cue reads it.
The app is whatever surface is in front of you, and no more.
This only works if the app trusts Apple's other surfaces. An app with a please open me for the best experience mindset cannot do this. It has to accept that the notification on the lock screen is the experience, the Watch haptic is the experience, the CarPlay silence is the experience. If those fire correctly, the user doesn't need to see anything else.
There is a quiet economic argument too, which I'll mention and move on from. Every time a user opens an app to do a thing, the app has one more chance to screw it up, the wrong screen loads, a modal appears, a splash animation runs, a prompt asks if you've left a review. The fewer openings, the fewer chances. You increase product quality by decreasing product surface.
I have a small test I run against my own app. I imagine a user whose phone is locked, on the counter of their kitchen, while they stand next to it making coffee. Can the app help them? Can it surface the right thing? Can it stay invisible if the user is not going anywhere? Can it whisper to the Watch if the user is on a walk, without being loud to the phone? If yes, the design is working. If the app requires the phone to be unlocked and opened for anything useful to happen, the design has failed. Not because the user can't open it. Because they shouldn't have to.
That test, the locked phone on the counter, the user two feet away, making coffee, is the real product, more than any screen in the app. I have made a lot of decisions by picturing that user. I recommend it as a design prompt for anyone building anything in this category. What can you give them from where they already are?
If the answer is nothing, open a browser, build a website, save yourself the App Store review.
If the answer is something, build the app.