AI is the new front door for mobile apps

The app experience is going through its biggest shakeup since Apple launched the App Store.

If you followed Apple's WWDC or Google I/O this year, one message came through loud and clear: Apple and Google want AI assistants like Siri and Gemini to become the primary way people interact with their phones and the apps they’ve installed. Instead of opening an app first, users will increasingly ask AI to do something for them.

For product leaders and brand owners, that notion can trigger some panic: If AI becomes the primary interaction layer, what happens to the carefully crafted app experiences you've spent years building?

Here's the good news: The app interface isn't disappearing. It's just getting a new front door.

While Apple and Google would certainly love users to spend as much of their journey as possible inside Siri or Gemini, the realities of complex digital experiences suggest something different. AI isn't replacing apps. It's becoming the new way to reach them.

For more than fifteen years, the app experience almost always started the same way: Find an app, tap the icon, and navigate through screens to accomplish a task. Apple and Google are spearheading a different model, where AI becomes the first interaction layer. Instead of opening an app first, users will begin by asking Siri or Gemini what they want to accomplish.

That doesn't make apps less important. In many ways, it makes them even more important.

Your app still contains the business logic, proprietary data, APIs, and workflows that make your product valuable. The difference is that those capabilities are no longer accessed exclusively through your app's interface. Increasingly, they'll be invoked directly by AI, which can surface the right capability at exactly the right moment.

As AI interfaces take on more discovery and simple interactions, branded apps become the destination for richer experiences, more complex workflows, and the moments where trust matters most. The challenge for product teams isn't protecting a single interface anymore. It's designing products that work seamlessly across multiple ways of interacting.

As dramatic as this shift feels, we've actually seen versions of it before.

Every few years, mobile operating systems create a new way for users to reach your app without opening it directly. Push notifications, home screen widgets, App Intents, Live Activities, Dynamic Island, and Shared With You all changed how we found, launched, and engaged with an app. In some cases they eliminated the need entirely to launch an app just to complete a quick task..

Conversational AI is the next, and potentially biggest, step in that evolution.

Rather than presenting users with another visual shortcut, AI can understand intent, identify the right capability, and connect people directly to the outcome they're looking for. Organizations that embrace this shift won't be replacing their apps. They'll be making the value inside those apps easier for conversational agents to discover and leverage.

Let's address the uncomfortable question: If AI becomes the primary interaction layer for everyday tasks, is that actually a bad thing?

For many products, the honest answer is no. If someone wants to check tomorrow's weather, see a recent credit card charge, track a package, or find the departure gate for their flight, they don't care about your navigation hierarchy or beautifully animated transitions. They simply want the answer as quickly as possible.

In those moments, speed beats pixels. If your product can deliver its core value through a conversational request instead of requiring someone to navigate multiple screens, you're still winning. The product was never just the interface — it has always been the service behind it.

But those examples all have something in common: They're relatively simple interactions.

The real test isn't whether AI can answer a question or complete a straightforward task. It's what happens when the workflow becomes more complex, the decision becomes more consequential, or the stakes become higher.

That's where the story changes.

There's one thing AI still can't shortcut: trust.

People are perfectly comfortable asking AI to summarize emails or find flight options. They're much less comfortable letting AI purchase a $1,200 airline ticket without seeing exactly what they're buying. The higher the stakes, the more people want visual confirmation, especially when it comes to money, healthcare, travel, or identity.

That's why we believe app experiences are evolving toward a hybrid model. AI will increasingly become the discovery layer, while branded apps remain the place where users complete higher-stakes tasks with confidence. Discovery and execution are becoming separate experiences, and the handoff between them will become one of the most important design challenges for product teams.

A user might ask Siri or Gemini to find the cheapest nonstop flight to Tokyo. But when it's time to compare fare classes, confirm baggage rules, apply loyalty benefits, select seats, and confidently tap Buy, they're going to want the proven experience in the airline's app.

Because that's where trust lives.

If AI becomes the new front door, product teams need to rethink what they're optimizing for.

Since the dawn of the App Store, app success was defined by engagement metrics like how often users opened your app. Moving forward, success will require making your app's capabilities discoverable before users ever launch it.

That means more than simply implementing Apple's or Google's latest AI frameworks. It requires exposing meaningful capabilities instead of just screens, designing thoughtful handoffs between conversational AI and richer in-app experiences, and architecting your application so those capabilities can be invoked independently of the traditional UI.

There's also a competitive dimension to this shift.

Imagine two rideshare apps with nearly identical features. One has invested in iOS’s App Intents or Android’s App Functions, allowing Siri or Gemini to estimate arrival times, book rides, and participate in larger AI-driven workflows. The other still keeps those capabilities locked behind its traditional user interface.

Now imagine a user tasking their AI assistant to book a ride home and coordinate dinner delivery so the meal arrives shortly after they do. If one app is AI-ready and the other isn't, the assistant won't ask the user to manually open the less capable app. It'll simply work with the application that can fulfill the request.

The companies that begin modernizing their apps for AI interfaces today will be in a much stronger position when Siri and Gemini become a routine part of how people interact with their phones.

Preparing for that future isn't just about adopting new APIs. It requires product, design, and engineering teams to fully consider how their applications expose capabilities to AI. That includes modeling data in platform-friendly ways, implementing the new agentic discovery frameworks in the operating systems, and carefully designing when an AI interaction should transition into a richer, in-app experience.

So, the question is no longer, "How do we get users to open our app?"

It's becoming, "How do we make our app the one AI chooses to work with?"

This shift won't happen overnight, but the direction is becoming increasingly clear. The organizations that succeed won't be the ones that resist AI as a new interface. They'll be the ones that make their products easy for AI to discover while continuing to invest in the branded experiences only their apps can deliver.

In our next two posts, we'll move from strategy to implementation.

We’ll explore Android's App Functions framework and how Gemini discovers, understands, and invokes your application's capabilities. Then we'll dive into Apple's App Intents, App Schemas, and Snippet Views to see how Siri is evolving into a richer interface for mobile experiences, and what product and engineering teams need to do to prepare.

The future of mobile isn't about choosing between AI and apps. It's about building products that work seamlessly with both.

At ArcTouch, we help organizations design and build mobile experiences that delight users today while preparing for the platforms of tomorrow.

If you're evaluating what Apple's and Google's latest announcements mean for your app roadmap, we'd love to help.