One app to rule them all
In my various conversations with industry stakeholders I often hear that Farmers do not want more apps. I’m told that they want less noise or one app that does everything.
At the same time it also seems like the biggest technology companies in the world are thinking in that direction. For example, Elon Musk is pushing X toward an “everything app”, layering in payments, messaging and AI into a single surface. OpenAI also said this week that it is moving in a similar direction, trying to collapse chat, coding, research and content creation into one place.
Different starting points but the same idea. One interface that absorbs everything else.
In ag, if you have ever watched someone juggle a spray diary, a job sheet, a compliance system, a weather app and a spreadsheet, the appeal is obvious. One system, one login, one place where everything lives not skipping between a collection of apps on mobile or otherwise.
But I think we risk taking that idea too literally, and I think that it may be leading us in the wrong direction.
When a farmer says they want one app, I’m pretty sure that rhey are not making a product design decision. I think that they are actually describing friction. Too many logins. The same data entered multiple times. Systems that do not talk to each other. Tools that only solve part of the problem.
So that frustration is real but I think that it is the interpretation of this frustration where things start to drift.
As I see it, researchers and agtech companies have taken that farmer signal and turned it into a requirement without fully understanding the need. Build the platform. Do everything in one place. It fits nicely into a strategy document, government report or an investor deck.
But the more I think about it, the more I think that it flattens the problem.
Over the past decade we have seen what happens when you follow that path. Large, all in one systems that try to cover every workflow. The one ring to rule them all. They promise to be the system of record for the farm. In practice they become broad, rigid, and only partially used. People adopt the pieces that work and route around the rest with notebooks, spreadsheets and messaging apps.
I don’t think the issue is that there are too many tools. I think the fundamental is that that their makers flatly refuse to work well together.
For what its worth, my observations of tech use on farm tell me that farmers will happily use multiple tools if each one is clearly better at its job and if the effort of using them together is low. That is already how most farms operate. The problem is that each tool tends to be a silo, with weak APIs, limited export options, and very little thought given to how it fits into a wider workflow. Everyone wants to win, they don’t care who they tread on to do it and they don’t care how it impacts the overall experience.
When you think about it that way, the current push toward “super apps” looks less like progress and more like a repetition of the same mistake la we’ve already seen at a larger scale.
It assumes the answer is centralisation. Fewer systems to own the user, the data, and the workflow.
That might work in more uniform environments but I don’t think it will in agriculture.
As I’ve said many times, Farms are not standardised systems. They vary by commodity, region, scale, climate, and operator. Trying to capture all of that in a single product either leads to bloat or to abstraction that strips out the detail, and the detail is REALLY important.
I think there’s another way to think about all this.
Not fewer apps, but rather better composition.
Small, focused tools that do one thing well. Data that can move between them without friction. Workflows that span multiple tools without manual stitching. In that world, the number of apps becomes far less important than how easily they can be combined.
This is where the current wave of AI tooling becomes interesting, not because it replaces software, but because it can sit across it. If you can anchor everything in a shared record of what actually happened on farm, and allow software to act across tools using that context, then the user no longer has to think in terms of individual applications at all.
The infrastructure coordinates the tools above it.
That is a very different model to the monolithic platform. It shifts value toward interoperability, clear data structures, and tools that are designed to be used alongside others rather than in isolation.
It is also a harder path, which is why the RDCs, Industry groups and Universities keep defaulting to “just build one platform”.
More choice on its own will not fix anything. There is already plenty of mediocre software in the market (sorry mediocre software developers). The gap is not quantity, it is quality and the ability to work together. Vibe coding is also likely to exacerbate this a lot in the short and probably medium term as hobbies solutions flood the ecosystem. I’m already seeing a tonne of crappy apps come into existence.
We have spent a lot of time trying to reduce the number of tools a farmer uses. It might be more useful to focus on reducing the cost (financial, mental, time etc) of using multiple tools together.
So I guess the one app or one platform idea is an understandable response to the problem. But if we keep taking it at face value, we risk building more tools that look simpler but ultimately make things more complex by reducing choice.