Get ready for the new platform

Stop the code that goes everywhere

Android and iOS are platforms. Not two targets of the same codebase.

Stop treating Android and iOS as one application. Stop writing code that goes on everything — Flutter, React. Think per platform and write in the OS's native language. That's what has to stop.

And if you think AI is about to erase that difference, the opposite is happening.

With AI, which platform?

The real question to ask today is this one: with AI, what will the platforms be? Yesterday it was Swift on one side and Kotlin on the other. Tomorrow, which will be which?

From what I understand of my analysis, there will be two, and they have nothing in common. There will be the MCP platform. And there will be the App Intents platform, at Apple.

The MCP platform

That one is simple. You build an MCP that knows how to do various actions. The goal: every action a customer can take digitally should be doable through an MCP.

And MCP is nobody's camp. MCP is ChatGPT, it's Claude, it's Android, and it's any service builder that comes to sit on top. Everything will work with the MCP. That's why there is an MCP platform to work on, and why it doesn't replace the native work: it adds to it.

Give AI everything that carries no experience

Here is the rule, and it's the one thing to remember if you only remember one.

Everything non-experiential, everything that delivers no experience: give it to AI. Everything that makes someone live an experience: focus on it.

What this buys you is room. Room on your websites, room in your applications. Everything without value, you set aside. Everything that can make someone feel something, you concentrate on. And the digital experience will become incredible.

Apple, the real difference

Here, everything changes. And it's a very big difference.

At Apple, it's a more complex technology, and it will force you to code in Swift. It goes through App Intents, through Siri and Spotlight. The principle: you declare in your application "Siri, you can do this. Siri, if someone tells you that, here is what it triggers."

This isn't an empty promise: Apple calls them interactive snippets — a result displayed and actionable directly in Spotlight or in Siri, without ever bringing your app to the foreground. And since SiriKit was deprecated, App Intents have become the only way in.

There's a level above, more ambitious: Siri knowing the train is late and offering to cancel or exchange the ticket, without you even asking. Know that this one doesn't come from App Intents alone — the system suggests based on what your app has given it, but the user has to be the one looking. For a true unsolicited alert, you have to assemble: notifications, Live Activities, automations. It's doable, it's not free.

One last point, and it's the most important one for your trade-offs. Today, I don't advise using this as an excuse to strip from your application the features Siri can now cover. Because everything runs locally — and not the same way for everyone. The base tier runs on the device, a heavier second tier needs a recent chip and enough memory, and the rest goes to Apple's servers. iPhone 14s, base iPhone 15s and Intel Macs are excluded. So whether the experience will be as fast for everyone, I don't know.

What I do know, though, is that it will answer the needs of the very young and the needs of seniors. That, without any doubt.

And at Google

At Google, you'll have App Actions Gemini Extensions. And you'll also have real MCPs inside Gemini, including in search. So it's not Apple's model: the open door stays open.

Then there will be a different, specific part once we're on the phone, on the OS. Because the day Gemini is truly integrated into the OS, there will be an OS-specific logic.

And that's where everything meets. People will go back to thinking Swift development platform-first. Same for Kotlin. Because either way, it's the OS that wins tomorrow.