The app is no longer the whole product

For more than a decade, the app has been where businesses built their relationship with the customer. It became the place we bank, shop, travel, watch, listen, order and book.

Unsurprisingly, that shaped how we think about Product; the app roadmap, the app team, customer engagement, conversion, and retention.

But the boundaries of the product have moved. The app is now one part of a much wider connected experience, and the question I keep coming back to with clients is a simple one: what is the customer actually trying to achieve, and what is the best way for our product to help them achieve it?

That is a different starting point from assuming all value gets delivered through the app itself.

The journey is already distributed

For years the mobile journey was linear. A customer had a need, unlocked their phone, found the app, opened it, completed an action.

Now that journey arrives in pieces. It might start with a notification, continue through a widget, run through a digital wallet, surface on a wearable, get handed to an AI assistant, or finish in a physical store, and the customer may never open the app at all.

The global payment data makes the point. In Worldpay’s 2026 Global Payments Report, digital wallets accounted for 77% of online spend across Asia-Pacific, and in Hong Kong wallets overtook cards as the leading payment method for the first time. A wallet transaction is a real commercial interaction with your brand, it just doesn’t happen inside your app.

None of which makes mobile less important; it makes it more important. The phone is still the closest permanent connection between a business and its customer, it is the experience around it that has expanded. The opportunity is to build the capabilities and services that let the product show up at the right moment, in the right place, for the right need.

Engagement is not the outcome

There is a commercial implication here that is easy to miss.

For years, app adoption and engagement have been treated as strategic objectives in their own right; increase downloads, increase monthly active users, increase session frequency, and increase time spent in app.

That encourages us to optimise for interaction rather than outcome. If a customer completes what they need through a wallet, a notification or an assistant without opening the app, is that a worse experience? Not necessarily. If they’re more satisfied, more likely to buy, easier to serve and more likely to stay, the commercial result may well be better.

The goal is to maximise the value the product creates for the customer and the business. That changes both where we invest and how we judge success — and it’s the same discipline behind fixing the app before buying more traffic.

The roadmap shouldn’t be defined by the channel

This is the implication I’d push hardest on.

If your Product strategy is effectively a list of things you intend to ship into an iOS or Android application, you are almost certainly prioritising an output rather than a customer outcome.

A more useful sequence:

• What is the customer trying to achieve?
• What business outcome does that support?
• What capability needs to exist?
• What data, services and integrations sit underneath it?
• And only then: where should that experience live?

Sometimes the answer is still absolutely the app. Plenty of journeys need a rich visual interface, and plenty need to start in an app; but it no longer follows that the whole journey has to live there.

Take travel. A customer doesn’t want to keep opening an airline app to find out what’s happening. They want boarding information when they need it, a delay to appear immediately, directions when they reach the airport, a boarding pass they don’t have to search for. The product outcome should be about getting them through the journey with as little effort and stress as possible.

Retail is the same in a different shape. Customers want to choose how and where they buy: app, web, store, another touchpoint, or some combination. What they won’t accept is being pushed down a route because it suits the business, or finding that their benefits, loyalty value and recognition only work in one channel. The value should follow the customer, not the channel.

AI adds an action layer

AI has accelerated all of this because it inserts another layer between the customer and the products they use.

We’re past theory here. In August 2026, Google connected thirteen third-party services to Gemini, including OpenTable, Ticketmaster and GetYourGuide, so the assistant can book a table or find tickets rather than just describe how to. Days earlier, Gemini had passed a billion monthly users.

This raises an uncomfortable question: what happens when a customer can use your product’s capability without ever entering the experience you own?

The complexity underneath doesn’t disappear; it matters more. Your data has to be accessible, your services connected, your APIs reliable, your identity and permissions understood. Your proposition has to be clear enough that another interface can represent it accurately, and it still needs to feel like your brand.

Increasingly that means asking whether your product is ready to be used by agents, not just humans. Can another trusted service understand what your product does? Can it access the right capabilities securely? Are permissions, pricing and business rules explicit enough for an action to complete without someone navigating your UI?

That may become as important a Product capability as designing the interface itself. We’ve written more on where this is real and where it isn’t, and on what agentic AI means for retail.

So the question isn’t “where can we add AI to our app?” It’s “how does AI change the way customers access and use our product?”

Which parts of the relationship do you need to own?

If a customer discovers, chooses and completes an action through an assistant or a third-party interface, how do you hold on to your brand, your relationship and your understanding of that customer?

That’s not a technology question. It affects trust, loyalty, first-party data, attribution, differentiation and ultimately commercial value. Businesses will need to decide which parts of the customer relationship they’re willing to let another interface own — a tension we explored for aviation in who owns the customer relationship.

The app doesn’t need to own every interaction, but it remains one of the strongest places to build a direct relationship, understand your customers and create value nobody else can represent.

Where this leaves Product teams

Building excellent mobile applications still matters. The craft is fundamental, but the canvas is bigger, and the work is increasingly about connecting Product strategy, experience, technology, data and AI around a customer need and a commercial outcome.

Sometimes that means a better app, sometimes it means a more capable platform underneath it. Sometimes it means connecting into a wallet, a wearable or another interface, or preparing the product so its capabilities can be used safely through an agent. Often it means using AI to remove steps from a journey rather than adding a feature to it.

We don’t think the app is disappearing, far from it. It will remain one of the most important owned experiences a business has. But its value will increasingly come from how well it connects into the ecosystem around the customer.

Over the coming months we’ll dig into what that means in practice for AI, loyalty, connected experiences and how businesses decide where to invest. Stay tuned as we dive further into the implications for both customers and brands.