800,000 people pre-ordered it. On 31 July, Google cancelled it anyway
Not because it failed. Because 800,000 people wanted it, and Google decided the thing they wanted was the wrong shape. Their words: "instead of asking you to download yet another app we've decided to take an entirely different approach: one where apps emerge naturally, in the course of your everyday conversations with Gemini."
The AI Studio app was shown at I/O in May. It let you build software by describing it. It now won't exist as an app; the capability folds into Gemini itself.
📦 The interesting part isn't another Google cancellation. It's the bet underneath it: that the "app" may no longer be the unit of software.
Our sequence has been the same for forty years, have a need, find an app, install it, learn it, work around what it won't do. The bet is: say it, have it, discard it.
I've drifted into that already. The small tools I've needed these past months, tracking spend, watching a flight, reconciling numbers, none came from a store. I asked an agent and got them. No icon, no updates, changed when they were wrong.
Our sequence has been the same for forty years, have a need, find an app, install it, learn it, work around what it won't do.
🎓 So what does that mean for children?
If "making software" shifts from knowing how to code it to being able to say precisely what you want, the centre of gravity in what schools teach moves from operating tools to describing and judging them. Not that code stops mattering, but stating what you want, and telling whether what came back is actually it, moves from the edge to the middle.
⚠️ Two things I won't take at face value. "Apps emerging in conversation" is a statement of intent, not a shipped product, and Google confirmed in the same breath that aistudio.google.com stays, because serious work still wants a workbench, not a chat box. And cancelling an app is cheaper: one surface instead of three. That decision is both a vision and a saving. Both are true.
When did you last install a new app on purpose?
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