Ephemeral Apps: Software That Exists for Five Minutes

You're paying $55 a month for Photoshop. You open it twice a month. Both times you need to do the exact same thing: remove a background from a product photo. That's it. The other 498 features? Never touched. Every month you pay for a 4GB behemoth you don't want, licensing cost for a dozen tools you'll never use, because the one thing you needed—"remove this background"—requires renting an entire creative suite.

Imagine instead: you describe what you need. An interface appears. Perfectly designed for background removal. Nothing else. You complete the task. The interface vanishes. No installation. No license renewal. No bloat.

This isn't fantasy. This is what becomes possible when computers understand intent in real-time.

The Permanent App is a Compromise

Apps exist as permanent installations because we had no better option. Software cost money to build. Distribution was hard. Once you convinced someone to install your tool, you wanted them using it—and paying—forever. So you built everything imaginable into one package. The Swiss Army knife strategy. If you're already paying for Photoshop, why not throw in video editing? Why not AI filters? Why not a web design tool? Trap users in the ecosystem.

This made sense when software was scarce and distribution was expensive. Today it makes no sense.

The permanent app is a solution to a temporary problem. You need to edit a photo. That's temporary. The problem lasts fifteen minutes. But the app stays installed forever, consuming disk space, CPU cycles, maintenance burden. You never uninstall it because "I might need it again someday." Most apps you have installed are solving problems you haven't had in years.

The real cost isn't the subscription. It's the cognitive load. Every app you install is another system to learn, maintain, troubleshoot, update. You have a photo editor. A video editor. A design tool. A writing app. A research tool. A task manager. Each one is a different paradigm, a different UI, different keyboard shortcuts. Your brain is a dispatcher, routing problems to specialized tools.

This was fine when computers were shared household utilities. Today, when computers are personal and ambient, it's insane.

The Missing Piece: Generative UI

For decades, software had a choice: chat or traditional UI.

Chat is great for expressing intent. "Remove the background from this photo." Clear. Natural. Anyone can do it. The problem: chat is terrible for actual work. Once you've stated what you want, now what? You need controls. Sliders. Buttons. Adjustments. Undo. Preview. Chat doesn't give you that. Chat makes you communicate everything in sequential prose. That's exhausting for iterative, visual work.

Traditional UI is the opposite. It's excellent for interaction. Once the interface loads, you have precise control. You see your changes in real-time. You can refine. Adjust. Perfect. The problem: traditional UI requires you to find the right tool first. "Where is the background removal tool? Is it under filters or tools? What's it called?" You have to speak the app's language.

What if you combined them?

Generative UI is the synthesis. You describe your intent in natural language. The system generates a custom interface for that specific task. Not a generic interface with 500 options. A tailored interface built for this exact problem, in this exact context. Then you interact with it like traditional UI—sliders, previews, controls, immediate feedback. When you're done, it's gone.

This requires an AI system that understands your task deeply enough to generate a correct interface. It's not trivial. But it's now possible.

Consider how this changes the interaction model:

Before: Open Photoshop → navigate a menu tree → find "Remove Background" → learn the tool → complete task
After: State intent → interface appears → refine with immediate feedback → task complete → interface gone

The second is dramatically simpler. And the magic is that the interface doesn't exist beforehand. It's generated.

Three Concrete Futures

Let's be specific about what this means.

Email triage interface

You've been on vacation for two weeks. You have 1,247 emails. Most are noise. Some are urgent. Some are reading. Your intent: "Help me quickly categorize what matters."

An interface appears. It shows emails one at a time. For each one, four buttons: "Urgent," "Reading," "FYI," "Trash." A single-column layout. Fast. Below each email, one-line context about why the system thinks it might matter. You tap through in two minutes. Eighty percent of your inbox is triaged before you even know what time it is.

The interface was never installed. It didn't exist until you needed it. It will never exist again because you'll never triage exactly this inbox again.

Research dashboard

You're researching a competitor. Your intent: "Show me their strategy shift over the last three months."

An interface appears with six panels: funding timeline, executive moves, product launches, market positioning, customer acquisition channels, hiring trends. Each fed by real-time data. You can drill into any panel. Tweak the time range. Export findings. The interface is built precisely for this research, in this moment, with the data available now.

Tomorrow someone else researches a different competitor. Their interface looks different. It's tailored to their intent.

Content creation editor

You're editing a newsletter. Your intent: "Help me make this punchy and surprising."

An interface appears. Text on the left. On the right, a live visualization of reader attention—where your words land. Boring sentences are grayed out. Surprising ones are highlighted. Below that, AI suggestions for how to sharpen specific sentences. A button to "rewrite for more urgency." Another to "make this more concise." You edit live, seeing impact instantly.

This isn't Word. This isn't Google Docs. This is an interface built for exactly what you're doing right now. For you. In this moment.

The Economics Flip

Today's software economics are perverse. You pay for capacity you don't use.

Photoshop costs $55/month because you might need any of 500 features. Most users will never touch 80% of them. The price reflects the possibility of use, not actual use. You subsidize everyone else's features.

Ephemeral apps reverse this.

You pay for what you actually do. You use the background removal interface for five minutes? You're charged for five minutes of compute and network. Maybe $0.01. You never use it again? You never pay again. Compare that to $55/month forever, whether you use it or not.

This feels cheap because it is cheap. But it's also transformative for businesses. Instead of "How can we force users into subscriptions?", the question becomes "How can we make this so useful that users want to use it repeatedly?" The incentives flip from capture to value.

For the software maker, the economics change too. Instead of building a monolithic product used badly, you're building narrow, focused tools used perfectly. Smaller engineering surface. Lower maintenance burden. Higher perceived value because the interface is tailored.

The platform takes a cut. Developers build interfaces. Users get exactly what they need. The rent-seeking middle-man business model (Photoshop) becomes unnecessary.

Why This Requires an OS

This isn't just a UX innovation. This requires a fundamental shift in how computers work.

Traditional operating systems manage hardware: memory, CPU, disk, network. They run permanent applications that manage themselves.

Ephemeral apps require an OS that manages intent and lifecycle.

When you express an intent, the OS needs to:

Understand what you're asking
Find (or spawn) the right interface for that task
Load the necessary data and context
Surface the interface to you
Monitor your interaction
Detect when you're done
Clean up the interface and free resources

This is new. This requires the OS to be agent-aware. To have a model of what tasks look like. To orchestrate the generation, display, and retirement of interfaces.

This is why Rush exists as an OS, not just an app. You need something managing the layer below individual applications. You need something that understands "the user is done with this task" and can confidently destroy the interface. You need something that can spawn custom UIs on demand.

This is also why it's not fragile. Because the OS isn't managing the permanence of apps—it's managing the lifecycle of tasks. If an ephemeral interface crashes, who cares? It was supposed to dissolve anyway. You just trigger the intent again. A new interface spawns.

The Transition Problem

Here's the hard part: we're still in the permanent app era.

Every software company has built a moat around "install our app and you're stuck with us." Slack wants you installing Slack. Microsoft wants you installing Office. Adobe wants you installing the Creative Suite. They've optimized for installation, subscription, and stickiness. They've hired thousands of people to make their apps do more, not better.

Ephemeral apps are threatening to all of this. If software only exists when you need it, nobody has switching costs. Nobody has sunk time learning your UI. The first interface you spawn for "email triage" might come from Provider A. The next one might come from Provider B. You'll choose based on quality each time, not habit.

This is destabilizing for incumbent software companies. Which is why it probably isn't coming from them. It's coming from companies built on AI and intent from the ground up, not trying to retrofit it onto permanent applications.

The Most Powerful Software is What You Never Install

Think about the most elegant software you use. The stuff you reach for without thinking.

It doesn't sit on your computer consuming resources. It appears when you need it. It does exactly one thing well. It gets out of your way when you're done.

Google's search box. Apple's Spotlight. The command palette in your code editor. These are ephemeral interfaces. They exist for a few seconds. They solve a specific problem. They vanish.

The future is extending this principle across all computing. Not just search. Not just tasks. Everything.

You'll spend less time installing, configuring, learning, and maintaining software. You'll spend more time on the actual work that matters. The computer becomes less visible. Less management overhead. More ambient.

And the economics snap into place: you pay for what you use, when you use it. Developers build focused, excellent tools. The OS orchestrates the layer below.

The permanent app as we know it isn't going away tomorrow. There's too much invested in the current model. But the trajectory is clear. As AI systems get better at understanding intent, as interface generation becomes reliable, as compute gets cheaper, the incentives all point in one direction.

Fewer installations. More tasks. Software that appears when you need it. Software that vanishes when you don't.

The most powerful software is what you never have to install.

Rush is the agent OS that generates purpose-built interfaces for each task—then dissolves them. See how it works.