As designers, we have a duty to try new tools.
To explore, to poke around, to see how others build.
It sharpens your taste. Keeps your instincts fresh. Makes you a better builder.
But I very rarely stick to these new products.
Not because I’ve lost curiosity, but because I’m scared to fall in love again.
We’ve all been there.
You find a new app. It’s fast, thoughtful, beautifully designed.
You start using it every day. It sneaks into your muscle memory.
And then one morning, you wake up to a LinkedIn post titled:
“We’re thrilled to announce we’ve been acquired by [insert Big Tech name here].”
You know the drill.
A few weeks or months later, the servers go dark.
🪦 Sunrise → Microsoft
🪦 Wunderlist → Microsoft
🪦 Mailbox → Dropbox
🪦 Vine → Twitter
🪦 Sparrow → Google (a small drop in a sea of dead products)
🪦 Zenly → Snap
🪦 Visual Electric → Perplexity
Enter the cool apps graveyard®.
An ironically beautiful, depressing list.
It’s inspiring to watch entire teams live the dream of being acquired, with hopefully life-changing consequences. It’s part of the startup thrill.
But what a weird paradox, watching dozens, if not hundreds, of great products get axed along the way.
Great products, with millions of users, hardcore fans, and years of sweat behind them.
Killed.
I still remember vividly this unofficial meeting amo’s design team had with Josh, The Browser Company of New York’s founder.
A couple of weeks earlier, The Browser Company of New York became for a little while, The Browser Company of Paris. We would welcome Josh, and sometimes, the extended team, at our office.
The meeting goal was to brainstorm on a few Arc features (yes, some of them shipped), and it started by a simple question from Josh:
“Who here is using Arc browser?”
Everyone in the room but me raised a hand.
Arc was installed. But I wouldn’t use it.
He asked why.
Of course, I was embarrassed, but I owed him the truth.
I just didn’t want to get attached to such a cool product.
Because I always do.
When a product is that well made, when you can feel the care in every pixel, every transition, you start rooting for it.
You invite friends. You evangelize it.
You start to forget how bad and dull the previous apps were.
And when it dies, you now have to go back to whatever you were using before, or use a subpar competitor instead.
It’s not just losing an app.
It’s losing a routine.
It’s losing a tiny piece of joy from your daily workflow.
Switching apps sounds trivial, but it’s not.
It’s a mental cost.
New habits, new shortcuts, new friction.
Every switch demands effort and faith.
That’s why I barely use new stuff anymore.
I’m back to OG calendar. Default mail. Default browser(s).
Not because they’re great, but because they’re just good enough.
In a world where everything can disappear overnight, I value my routine more than the new shiny thing.
This isn’t just nostalgia.
It’s a weird exhaustion many of us share.
The “cool apps” we love rarely die of bad design, of lack of traction.
They literally die of acquisition and acquihires.
A founder takes a deal, the team gets integrated, the vision gets diluted, and the product becomes an internal tool until someone finally pulls the plug.
And what dies with it isn’t just a brand. It’s raw taste.
Each one of those apps raised the bar for craft, for motion, for delight.
They reminded us that software could have personality.
And every time one vanishes, the internet becomes a bit more boring.
It’s a bit of a paradox for me, as I’ve been in this situation. First rank.
It’s not just about nostalgia and about “cool” apps though.
In our craft, there’s another risk we can’t ignore: our everyday tools could also be impacted.
Everything we build now lives inside closed systems.
Maybe that’s why I’ve become so conservative with tools.
I still install everything worth trying and testing for the sake of learning, of discovering new trends, new habits.
It’s part of the job after all.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m still in awe every time I discover a great new piece of software.
But I just rarely stick to it.
Falling in love with new software has become risky.
You can’t trust that anything will last.
And it’s sad, because that excitement, that “holy shit, this is so cool” feeling is what pushed so many of us into this industry in the first place.
If I ever build another startup, I’d call it Encore.
A place where dead apps get a second act. (Not Zenly though, we’ve done that with amo already.)
Where the products that once made us dream could live again, maintained by the people who loved them most.
In the meantime, I’ll keep using my boring defaults.
Without the slightest fomo.
Call me old school. Or stubborn. Or stupid.
But every time a new app shows up, part of me still wants to believe.
That maybe this one will survive.
That maybe this one will make it past the graveyard.
Which app would you resurrect tomorrow if you could?
Julien.