"Real" and stranger funeral... for mobile applications

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In an unusual scene, the American startup artificial intelligence company Photon organized a real funeral for mobile applications on the basis that the era of these applications has begun its countdown in favor of AI agents.

The "real" funeral was held in a church, and speeches were delivered along with all the funeral procedures, according to what was reported by TechCrunch, a site specialized in technology topics.

Daniel Tian, the co-founder and CEO of Photon, stated that the "funeral for apps" event - held in San Francisco - was a day dedicated to developers, featuring discussion sessions with representatives from companies like Versal, Stripe, and OpenAI, and the event included a real coffin containing app icons.

Although organizing a "funeral for apps" represents a kind of joke and humor, Tian believes that the era of applications is nearing its end; he said - while discussing the shift from apps to agents, "Honestly, it will take some time, but I believe this shift is inevitable in terms of the general trajectory."

The basic idea behind the startup originated from the fact that users are no longer willing to install new applications on their devices; rather, they prefer to access "agents" that operate through the messaging applications they already use, such as iMessage and WhatsApp.

It is noted that Tian and Ryan Chou, the co-founders of Photon Tian, began thinking about establishing it as a result of their experience in developing consumer-oriented applications during their studies.

Every time they developed a new application, they faced the same obstacle of how to connect it to people. They then discovered that by developing an artificial intelligence agent that works within a platform or application that everyone uses daily, like iMessage or WhatsApp, they could reach users.

For example, Tian had developed a "chatbot" to respond to messages from his friends via "iMessage" as if he were writing the response himself. When he launched this technology as an open-source project on the "GitHub" platform, it was adopted by thousands of developers; which led them to dedicate their efforts entirely to this project.

The open-source version of the "Photon" program still constitutes 98% of its total usage today.