My answer: not immediately. But its structural profits will be quietly, steadily eroded—and the way it happens is subtle enough that many people won’t notice until the numbers start to move.
In the mobile era, we got used to a simple truth: if you control the home screen, you control the money. The App Store was never just a software catalog. It was a tollbooth placed at the one place users had to pass through.
That premise is what the Agent era challenges.
I. The App Store Doesn’t Really Sell Apps—It Sells Gatekeeping
The App Store’s core asset has never been “distribution” in the neutral, technical sense. Distribution is a commodity now. What the App Store truly owns is the gate:
the default user entry point
the power to route attention and traffic
control of the payment rail
the right to tax the ecosystem
In the classic mobile loop, the sequence looks like this:
user → opens an app → uses a service
platform controls the entry point → takes ~30%
That structure works for one reason: the user must consciously open the app. As long as the app icon is the front door, the platform owns the doorframe—and can charge rent.
II. The Fatal Change in the Agent Era: Apps Stop Being the Entry Point
Once an agent becomes the default gateway, the flow changes into something like:
user → tells the agent → agent dispatches capabilities → calls an app’s backend APIs
The key shift is psychological as much as architectural: the user no longer “opens an app.” The app becomes a background capability provider.
And when the user can’t even tell which app is being used, two things happen at once:
brand gravity weakens
entry-point value decays
Traffic follows the new front door. Whoever controls the agent increasingly controls attention and intent. And that is the App Store’s structural threat in one sentence.
III. The App Store Won’t Disappear—But It Can Be Hollowed Out
This won’t look like a dramatic collapse. It will look like slow “hollowing,” where the storefront still exists, but its economic center of gravity shifts. Three changes are likely.
First: fewer UI-heavy apps.
A large class of utility apps—especially those built around routine workflows—will be absorbed into agent behavior:
calendar coordination
lightweight editing
information aggregation
copy-and-paste data movement
These become invisible background functions. Users may not know which product is powering the result, and they won’t care—until someone asks who gets paid.
Second: the commission logic gets challenged.
If an agent can complete a purchase by calling a cloud API directly—without going through an in-app purchase flow—the traditional platform toll lane can be bypassed.
The 30% model works best when the platform owns the transaction surface. Agents, by design, prefer capability surfaces: web APIs, service endpoints, programmable commerce. That route is harder to tax.
Third: a “skills market” starts to replace an “apps market.”
It’s not hard to imagine an ecosystem that looks more like:
agent skill marketplaces
capability modules / plugins as tradable units
API ecosystems designed for agent orchestration
In that world, the store doesn’t vanish. It mutates. It stops selling “apps” as user-facing products and starts selling “capabilities” as agent-callable services. That’s a form shift—not an extinction event.
IV. The Real Conflict Isn’t the App Store—It’s Who Owns the Default Agent
The strategic question is not whether an App Store survives. The strategic question is: who becomes the default agent?
If it’s Apple’s agent, the App Store is absorbed and reinterpreted inside a new orchestration layer.
If it’s an OpenAI/Anthropic-style agent, the platform can be partially bypassed—relegated to infrastructure while value capture migrates elsewhere.
If it’s a local, open-source agent (think OpenClaw-like trajectories), then platform rent extraction weakens: the platform remains in the chain, but with far less bargaining power.
Once entry-point control shifts, profit follows. This is the true reason platforms are anxious. It’s not a debate about UX. It’s a battle over who owns the choke point.
V. Why Big Platforms Move So Carefully on Agents
This is why the largest platforms push agents with visible caution. They are walking a tightrope.
If their agent is too strong:
users open fewer apps
platform commission pressure increases
developer economics get restructured
If their agent is too weak:
users migrate to third-party agents
entry-point control gets stolen
the platform becomes a “hardware shell” around someone else’s brain
It’s a delicate game. The likely strategy is not “build an agent that replaces apps,” but “build an agent that strengthens the existing ecosystem while preventing displacement.”
Agents won’t directly destroy the App Store. But they can demote it—from an entry-point platform into a capability supply market.
Entry-point value compresses. Profit formulas get rewritten. And the ultimate winner is not the party who sells apps, but the party who defines the orchestration rules.
VI. The Final Question
The mobile internet era rewarded whoever controlled the entry point.
The agent era will reward whoever controls intent interpretation and execution scheduling.
When a user says just one sentence—“get this done for me”—the person (or system) deciding where the request gets routed is the one deciding where the money flows.
At that moment, the most valuable asset is no longer the app icon on the home screen.
It’s the agent in the background doing the dispatch.
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