Enshittification or appification? Why we build our own apps more and more often

You have probably seen the word pass by: enshittification. It is not a pretty term (apologies for that), but it sticks, because everyone recognises the feeling. The tools you use every day slowly get worse. More expensive, slower, fuller of notifications, upsells and AI buttons you never asked for. In this article I explain what the word actually means, and why we see the opposite happening on the other side: having your own app built has never been more within reach. Call it appification.

---

What is enshittification?

The word comes from the Canadian-British writer Cory Doctorow. He first used it at the end of 2022, and in 2023 the American Dialect Society named it Word of the Year. In 2025 he wrote a whole book about it.

Doctorow describes how online platforms decline, in three steps:

1. First, the platform is good to its users. It is free or cheap, it works well and everyone joins.
2. Then the value shifts to its business customers, such as advertisers and sellers. Users are locked in by now, so they can give up a little.
3. Finally, everyone gets squeezed for the shareholders. Both users and business customers get less for more money, because leaving takes too much effort.

The key word is lock-in. As long as leaving is hard, there is little stopping a platform from making things a bit worse. According to Doctorow, the process is mainly held in check by competition, regulation, the power of workers and the freedom of users to take matters into their own hands or switch.

---

Why your business feels it

On a social media app it is annoying. In the software your business runs on, it costs time and money. And most small businesses today run on a stack of subscriptions: one tool for planning, one for forms, one for quotes, one for customer follow up, and a few spreadsheets to tie it all together.

That works, until it does not:

• The price goes up, or you suddenly pay per user instead of per company.
• A feature you need moves to a more expensive plan.
• The tool does a hundred things, of which you use three. The other 97 get in your way.
• Your process adapts to the tool, instead of the other way around. People retype, copy and paste between systems that do not talk to each other.
• Your data is locked in. Exporting works in theory, but in practice you get a CSV nobody can do anything with.

None of these is a disaster on its own. But together they cost hours every week, and those hours never show up on an invoice.

---

The other side: appification

This is where it gets interesting. While many big platforms get worse, building your own app has become far more accessible in recent years. Modern frameworks take a lot of standard work off your hands, hosting is cheaper and simpler, and AI helps developers build and test faster. The threshold is a lot lower than it was a few years ago.

That changes the maths. Custom software used to be something for large companies with large budgets. A small app for a single process was too expensive to be worth it. Today it can be, which is why we increasingly build small, focused apps for things you used to simply buy a subscription for or track in a spreadsheet.

Think of:

• An intake form that immediately creates a file, a schedule and a confirmation email
• A customer portal where clients follow up on their own documents, appointments or orders
• A mobile app for staff on the road, that also works with a poor connection
• An internal dashboard that replaces three spreadsheets and a mailbox
• A link between two tools that do not talk to each other, so nobody has to retype anything

It does not have to be big. The best apps we build often do only a few things, but they do them exactly the way you work.

---

How we work ourselves

We do not say this just because we sell apps. GeNx itself runs almost entirely on software we built ourselves. For our own work we use:

• Our own native app for internal operations, where the day to day work comes together.
• Our own invoicing app, which works the way we invoice, not the other way around.
• Our own hosting management tool, to keep track of our clients' websites and servers.
• Our own booking tool, my.genx.be, where clients schedule an appointment themselves.
• TinyDesk for client feedback and support.

I work this way outside GeNx too. I also teach at Karel de Grote University of Applied Sciences, and to make my own work there run more smoothly, I built a native Canvas client: a desktop app that brings Canvas and the timetable together, works offline and sets up a new course in a few steps. Together with the other makers at HYPERCHICKEN we built TinyForms and Aptly, tools for forms and appointment scheduling. And porpor is our own app for iPhone and Android, simply because we liked the idea.

We build the same kind of things for clients. Mijn Middenvijver, for example, is a neighbourhood portal for the residents around the park where Live is Live takes place: one registration, and neighbours get discounted tickets, access passes and updates.

The upside of working this way: when something bothers us, we change it. No price increase out of nowhere, and no feature that disappears because a product team somewhere else has other priorities.

---

When is your own app not a good idea?

To be fair: not everything needs to be custom. For most standard things, a good existing product is the better choice.

---

How do you get started?

Start small. Pick one process that costs time every week and that everyone on your team sighs about a little. Write down what happens now, step by step, and where it gets stuck. That is often enough to see whether a small app could make the difference.

Then we build a first version that solves exactly that one problem. If it works, you can expand from there. If it does not work as expected, you have not lost much and you know a lot more.

---

Frequently asked questions

---