Every good app starts with a lie.
“We’re going to keep this simple.”
I love that sentence.
So optimistic.
So innocent.
So completely doomed.
At first, the app does one thing.
You open it.
You do the thing.
You leave.
Beautiful.
Then somebody adds analytics.
Then filters.
Then a sidebar.
Then “workspaces.”
Then team roles.
Then notifications.
Then an activity feed.
Then widgets.
And finally, inevitably:
The Dashboard.
Congratulations.
Your tiny useful app has completed its lifecycle and become enterprise software.
Nobody asks for the dashboard
That’s the funny part.
I have never opened an app and thought:
You know what this needs?
Four metric cards and a donut chart.
And yet dashboards are everywhere.
Project management app?
Dashboard.
Writing app?
Dashboard.
Bookmark manager?
Dashboard.
Tool for watering your houseplants?
Give it six months.
You’ll be comparing weekly moisture retention against the previous quarter.
Feature creep has excellent manners
Nobody says:
Let’s ruin the simplicity of this thing.
It happens politely.
“We should probably show recent activity.”
Sure.
“Users might want some stats.”
Makes sense.
“Could we add shortcuts?”
Why not.
“What about customizable widgets?”
Okay...
“Enterprise customers need roles and permissions.”
Fair.
“And maybe an AI assistant.”
Of course.
“And a marketplace.”
Wait.
How did we get here?
Six months ago this app converted PDFs.
Now I’m assigning workspace permissions so Brenda from Finance can access the Q3 conversion insights panel.
Feature creep never kicks the door down.
It asks if it can stay for the weekend.
Then it brings a toothbrush.
Then furniture.
Then suddenly it lives there and you’re paying its AWS bill.
We keep confusing “more” with “better”
This is where software gets weird.
If something can be added, we immediately start discussing how to add it.
Very rarely do we ask:
Should this exist at all?
A product with 40 features looks impressive on a pricing page.
It gives marketing more boxes to tick.
It gives sales more talking points.
It gives product teams something to ship.
And it gives users another settings page they will never open.
But capability is not the same thing as value.
Sometimes the best feature is the one that never got built.
Which is unfortunately hard to put in release notes.
Version 4.7
- Added nothing.
- Product still works.
- You’re welcome.
I would genuinely respect that update.
Simple software now feels luxurious
This might be the strangest part.
When I find software that opens quickly, does one thing well, and doesn’t immediately ask me to:
- create a workspace
- invite my team
- choose a template
- configure notifications
- watch a product tour
- “explore what’s new”
…it feels premium.
Not premium as in expensive.
Premium as in:
someone showed restraint.
There’s confidence in a product that doesn’t desperately need you to discover twelve other things it can do.
It just works.
Then it gets out of the way.
That used to be normal.
Now it feels almost rebellious.
The dashboard is usually a symptom
I don’t actually hate dashboards.
Some products genuinely need them.
If I’m monitoring servers, revenue, logistics or infrastructure, please give me graphs.
Give me alarming red numbers.
Give me twelve panels if you have to.
I’m talking about the other kind.
The dashboard that exists because the product no longer knows what its main job is.
The one where I log in and get:
Good morning, Jacob!
Thanks.
What now?
There are seven cards.
Three charts.
A “Getting Started” panel despite me using the product for two years.
A button that says Explore.
Explore what?
I came here to rename a file.
I miss software with edges
I miss products that knew where they ended.
They had a job.
They did it.
They didn’t try to become:
- your operating system
- your community
- your knowledge base
- your collaboration hub
- your analytics platform
- your personal assistant
- your second home
Not every app needs to become a platform.
Sometimes a timer can just be a timer.
Sometimes notes can just be notes.
Sometimes I would like to open software without being invited into an ecosystem.
I already live in one ecosystem.
It’s called the internet.
It’s exhausting enough.
Maybe “more” is the wrong direction
We’ve spent years asking:
What else can this product do?
Maybe the better question is:
What can we remove without making it worse?
That question is much harder.
Adding something feels productive.
Removing something feels dangerous.
But simplicity isn’t the absence of work.
Usually it’s the result of a lot of work nobody sees.
The best products often feel obvious.
And making something feel obvious is incredibly difficult.
So if you're building something right now, I have one small request.
Before adding analytics...
Before adding widgets...
Before adding customizable workspaces...
Before adding the card that tells me I’m “73% productive this week”...
Ask yourself:
Does this actually make the product better?
Or are we just slowly building another dashboard?
Because somewhere out there, a beautiful little app is currently doing exactly one thing really well.
And I guarantee somebody is already designing its sidebar.
What’s the worst case of dashboardification you’ve seen?
Or better:
What app do you love specifically because it still refuses to become one?