The nope space

There is a particular kind of "no thank you" you say when an app asks to be installed. It isn't a refusal of the thing the app offers. It is a refusal of the relationship — the icon on your home screen, the account, the notification permissions, the password reset email two years from now. You'd happily use the thing for the next ten minutes. You don't want the thing for the next ten years.

A link is the opposite problem. The page loads, you read it, and then it's gone. Useful for an instant; useless an hour later. There is no surface that holds it for you, no place it surfaces again when it becomes relevant. You bookmark it, and you never find the bookmark.

Most products live in this gap and don't know it. The wedding invitation. The hotel parking pickup with the driver's number. The Airbnb apartment guide. The doctor's appointment confirmation. The package being delivered on Thursday. Each is a thing you'd never install an app for, and a thing you'd resent having to search your inbox for in three months. They want a third surface — neither inbox nor home screen — that's quiet by default, present when relevant, and disappears when you swipe it away.

That surface already exists, and almost nobody is building for it. It is the wallet. Apple Wallet, Google Wallet. We use them for loyalty cards and boarding passes, but they can hold almost anything: a date you'd otherwise forget, a number you'd otherwise refresh, a status you'd otherwise have to ask about. The pass updates without being opened, surfaces when it's needed, and vanishes when it isn't.

I've been calling this gap the nope space. The set of things that don't deserve an app and aren't well served by an email. It turns out to be most things.

What follows is a list of those things, roughly ordered from the obvious to the absurd, and what each one would look like if it lived in the wallet instead. I've also been building a few of them, and the projects answer back to the thoughts they came from.