Physical Runtimes: Intent-Driven Computing and the End of Apps
- Rich Washburn
- 7 hours ago
- 4 min read
Let’s stop dancing around it. The App Store is dead.
Not “dying.” Not “evolving.” Dead.
It’s not because people don’t want software anymore. It’s because software no longer needs to be packaged, browsed, downloaded, or owned in the way we’ve pretended makes sense for the last fifteen years.
What comes next isn’t apps. It’s runtimes + agents + tokens. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
The App Store Was a Distribution Hack — Not a Law of Nature
The App Store solved a very specific problem at a very specific moment in history:
Smartphones needed third-party software
Users needed a safe way to install it
Developers needed a way to get paid
So we invented:
Apps as discrete objects
App stores as gated malls
Pricing models frozen in time (free, $0.99, $2.99, subscriptions forever)
It worked. Brilliantly.
But that model assumes software is static. That assumption just collapsed.
Intent Eats the App
Here’s the moment where everything changes:
You no longer need someone else to build the thing you want.
You say:
“I need to prep for this meeting.”
And an agent:
Pulls your calendar
Reads the last team thread
Grabs the deck from wherever it lives
Summarizes the deltas
Builds a dashboard
Renders it on the physical runtime you’re wearing
No app. No install. No UI decision made ahead of time.
The interface is generated on demand. So ask yourself the uncomfortable question:
What exactly are you “buying” from an App Store anymore?
The Runtime Is the New Storefront
In this new world, the physical runtime — the wearable, wristband, clip, soft display, whatever — is not the product.
It’s the terminal. The store is invisible.
The real commerce happens inside the agent layer, where:
APIs are called
Models are invoked
Compute spins up and down
Context is evaluated
Interfaces are rendered and discarded
That’s not app usage. That’s compute usage. Which means the unit of value is no longer an app. It’s a token.
Tokenization Is the Inevitable Outcome
This is the part most people haven’t wrapped their heads around yet.
When software is built on demand, the only sane pricing model is metered execution. Not subscriptions, licenses or app purchases.
Tokens.
Coding tokens
Inference tokens
API tokens
Data access tokens
Context tokens
Every time your agent:
Pulls data
Generates logic
Builds an interface
Renders a dashboard
Talks to you in your ear
…something ran.
When something runs, it costs something.
But here’s the key: It’s fractional.
Pennies become tenths of pennies.Tenths become thousandths.
Now imagine a meter running across every interaction on every device on Earth. That’s the new App Store economy.
You Don’t Buy Apps. You Spend Intent.
In this model, you don’t “own” software.
You express intent, and the system spends a tiny amount of compute to fulfill it.
Check a score at dinner → a few tokens
Generate a meeting prep dashboard → more tokens
Pull live security footage → tokens
Summarize a document → tokens
You’re not paying for things. You’re paying for outcomes.
Which is exactly how humans think anyway.
Where the Money Actually Is
This is the part investors, platform builders, and big tech will fight over.
Value accrues to whoever controls:
The runtime surface (the physical endpoint you wear or carry)
The agent OS (the intent interpreter and orchestrator)
The token rails (metering, billing, settlement)
Not the UI. Not the app. Not the feature list.
The toll booth is compute. And compute is everywhere now.
This Is Why Closed Devices Lose
Now zoom back to all the “AI companion” gadgets. Pins. Pens. Locked-down wearables. Closed ecosystems. They’re building appliances in a world that just switched to infrastructure.
If I can generate my own functionality by talking —Why would I accept a device that limits what I can build? If agents can wire APIs together instantly —Why would I wait for a developer roadmap?
Closed systems make sense when software is scarce.
In an agentic world, scarcity disappears. Only execution remains.
The Runtime Becomes a Personal Meter
Here’s the wild part. Your physical runtime doesn’t just show information.
It becomes your personal compute gauge.
You’ll feel it over time:
Certain tasks feel “heavy”
Others feel trivial
You’ll intuitively understand what costs more to run
Just like we learned data plans. Just like we learned battery life.
Only this time, it’s intent cost. Because everything is fractional, the barrier to experimentation drops to zero. Which means creativity explodes.
This Is the Real “iPhone Moment” for AI
Not a device. Not a pen. Not a shiny object.
The real moment is when:
Apps dissolve
Interfaces generate themselves
Agents become the OS
Tokens replace purchases
That’s the shift. That’s the platform transition.
That’s the moment the App Store quietly becomes obsolete — not because someone killed it, but because we outgrew it.
Final Thought
We are moving from:
“There’s an app for that.”
To:
“Just tell it what you want.”
Once intent becomes executable, software stops being a product and starts being a flow. Runtimes give it shape.Agents give it intelligence. Tokens give it an economy. Everything else is legacy thinking. And five years from now, we’ll look back at app icons the way we look at desktop shortcuts today — as artifacts from a time when computers didn’t yet understand us.
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