With the evolution of AI and agentic technology, will people still use apps in the next 5 to 10 years? Or will it all evolve toward app-less devices, with connected agents operating in the background and handling tasks on our behalf? Curious how others here think about this especially those building consumer apps today (like myself). Are we designing for a world that s already starting to disappear, or is there a long runway before agents can reliably replace the app experience?
Almost nobody fills in an optional field. I knew that, I shipped one anyway, and now I'm watching the thing I added specifically to improve quality get skipped by most of the people it would help.
The setup, without naming anything: the tool takes one input and produces a result. Adding a second, closely related input makes the result measurably better in exactly the places people complain about. It costs the user nothing no extra charge, same wait. It costs them one more step at the start.
I made it optional because the first run is where people quit. Asking for a second thing before anyone has seen a single result felt like the fastest possible way to lose them.
So now the version I'm actually proud of sits behind a field most people scroll past, and the version most people meet is the weaker one.
disclosure first I work on a tool in this space, so weigh it accordingly. not linking it, this isn't that post.
I went in assuming the failure mode would be detail. it isn't. wear survives better than I thought scuffs, paint marks, a dent all came through on the things I tested. what a single photo genuinely cannot give you is the parts of the object it never saw. the back is inferred, not captured, and on anything with a genuinely different back it shows.
honest read after a lot of tests:
works for a spinning hero shot, social video, a floating cutout on a slide or a plain background
works when the object is roughly symmetrical, or you only ever show the front
doesn't work as a substitute for a real turntable rig when the buyer will inspect the back
doesn't work if you need something dimensionally accurate rather than something that looks right
People keep losing work, and I can't tell any more whether the thing I built to protect them is just annoying them.
Background: the thing I work on generates a file for you in the browser. For a long time I stored nothing at all the input was discarded the second the output existed, and the output only lived in the tab you made it in. Two reasons. The storage bill for something people mostly make once and throw away looked bad at any real volume, and I liked being able to say plainly that nothing a user gave me sat on a server after they left.
What actually happened is that people would make something they were happy with, get distracted, close the tab, and lose it. No undo. Every email I got about it was some version of "can you get it back", and the answer was no there had never been anything to get back.
So I've just moved to a short retention window: the output is held long enough to hand to you and then deleted automatically within 24 hours. It fixes the complaint. But it's left me with three things I didn't expect:
Went through a few companies' vendor contracts recently and found the same pattern every time duplicate vendors solving the same problem, licenses nobody's using, contracts that quietly auto-renewed because no one was watching.
Has anyone here actually audited their full vendor contract list? What did you find?
Looking back at your first Product Hunt launch, is there something you wish you had known beforehand? Maybe it s a strategy that worked wonders later, a mistake you learned from, or even a small tip that made a big difference. For me, I realized how important timing and community engagement are but it took a lot of trial and error to figure that out. Share the lessons you ve learned and the advice you d give to someone preparing for their first launch. What s your golden nugget of wisdom?
