Every app starts simple. Then come the features, the metrics, the stakeholders, the quarterly goals. Here are five products that launched calm and slowly became anxious — told through their interfaces over time.
Success invites scope creep. iTunes didn't get bloated because Apple was incompetent — it got bloated because it was successful. Every new feature had a business case. It took 18 years and a complete product reset to get back to "one app, one job."
Skype had a 17-year head start on Zoom. It lost because it forgot its job. Users wanted to call people. Microsoft gave them Stories, Mojis, and a Snapchat clone. Zoom gave them a link that worked. Calm won.
Evernote didn't lose to a better note-taking app. It lost to a simpler one. While Evernote was adding tasks, calendars, home dashboards, and AI features, Apple Notes was doing the one thing users actually wanted: letting them write a note and find it later.
Google won by being the calmest page on the internet. Now it's one of the noisiest results pages. The homepage is still clean — but the moment you search, you're navigating a maze of AI summaries, ads, and "People also ask" accordions before you find an actual link. The simplicity was the product. They forgot.