Apps Aren't Dead. But For CRM Leaders, Most Are No Longer Worth Building.

Your app is the most expensive customer experience you own, and it may also be your least personal. For fifteen years, CRM, digital, and marketing leaders in retail and beauty were told the same thing: get customers to download the app, because that is where loyalty, repeat purchase, and the direct relationship live. That advice was right for its time, and the best apps still return more revenue per active customer than any other owned channel. But the ground has shifted, because the interface itself, the thing a customer actually touches, no longer has to be built in advance. When interfaces can be generated in the moment, the case for pouring quarters of engineering into a fixed one starts to collapse.

This piece is for the person who owns that decision, and the promise is simple: by the end you will have a sharper test for when an app still earns its cost, and when it does not.

What apps were genuinely good at, and the flaw everyone tolerated

Apps solved a real problem, and it is worth being honest about that before writing them off. They gave brands a persistent, permission-based surface with a direct line to the customer through push notifications. For a Head of Loyalty, the app was often the single best-performing channel by revenue per active customer, because it concentrated your most engaged buyers in one place. That is not a small thing, and any team that built one bought themselves years of compounding return. But the app carried a structural flaw that most leaders learned to live with rather than fix. It is effective, yet it is not truly personal, because two customers with completely different histories, budgets, and intentions open the same app and see almost the same thing. Merchandising rules and recommendation engines help, but they operate on segments and averages, not on the individual in front of you right now. Worse, that fixed interface is slow, hard, and expensive to change, so a meaningful redesign becomes a roadmap item measured in quarters and every experiment competes for the same scarce development capacity. The predictable result is that apps calcify: they ship, they age, and the gap between what a customer wants in a given moment and what the app can show them will keep widening. That gap used to be an acceptable cost of doing business. It is about to become a competitive liability, because the alternative just got radically cheaper. The takeaway is that apps were never failing at engagement; they were failing at personalisation, and they were doing it slowly and at great expense.

What actually changed, and why the maths is now different

The shift is that interfaces can now be assembled on the fly, in response to what a customer says. Agentic systems built on large language models will interpret a request in plain language and return the right product, answer, or next step, without a pre-built screen for that exact situation. This matters to you because it changes the unit economics of an entire category of work, not just the technology behind it. Think about the moments that make up most of your customer contact: a reorder of something bought three months ago, a cart abandoned last night, a question about whether a product suits sensitive skin, a "where is my order." None of those moments needs a download, an onboarding flow, or a home screen; each needs a fast, personal, context-aware exchange. Historically you had three options for these journeys, and all of them were costly: build them into the app, stitch them across email and SMS, or staff them with a service team. Now they will be handled in conversation, personalised for each customer, and adjusted in an afternoon rather than a quarter. That is the real story, and it is a story about cost and speed as much as capability. The opportunity cost of building an app has risen sharply, precisely because the alternative got so much faster and cheaper to stand up. To recap: the customer moments have not changed, but the cheapest, most personal way to serve them has, and it now lives outside the app. And the brands that see this first will redeploy the engineering budget they used to spend on app releases into experiences that actually flex to the individual. The important takeaway is that this is not a technology upgrade; it is a change in what is worth building at all.

The new role of apps: infrastructure

Apps do not disappear in this world, but they will move, and where they move is the whole point. They become infrastructure rather than destination, which means the catalogue, the inventory, the loyalty ledger, the payment rails, and the order history still need a reliable system of record. You should care about this because that infrastructure becomes more valuable, not less, since a conversational layer is only ever as good as the data and transactions it can reach. In practice, the investment you already made in commerce systems holds; what changes is where the customer spends their attention. That attention will move out of an app opened a handful of times a year and into channels the customer already lives in every day, where the relationship, the repeat purchase, and the service moment increasingly happen. There is still a narrow case where a dedicated app earns its place, and it is worth naming so you do not overcorrect: deep, considered, high-frequency experiences where rich visual browsing or complex configuration is genuinely the point. A flagship experience for your most committed customers can justify the build, and for those journeys the app may still win. The mistake will be assuming that logic stretches to cover every journey, when most journeys are routine, high-intent, and better served the instant the customer raises their hand. So the app is demoted from the centre of gravity to one surface among several, and often not the primary one. The takeaway is that the question is no longer whether you have an app, but which journeys deserve one.

The test to run before you build anything

Here is the practical test, and it is the one thing worth taking away from this piece. Before you commission or defend any app feature, ask: for this specific journey, is a purpose-built, slow-to-change interface worth the cost, when the alternative is a personal, conversational experience I can launch in weeks and revise every week? For discovery, brand, and a small set of high-consideration journeys, the honest answer will sometimes still be yes. For reorders, cart recovery, service, product guidance, and the everyday loyalty that drives repeat revenue, the honest answer will increasingly be no. Run that test journey by journey, not as a single verdict on "the app," because the right answer differs across your customer base. The leaders who win the next few years will not be the ones who ship a better app; they will be the ones who recognise that the interface has become fluid and act on it before their competitors do.

The bottom line

Customer expectations did not soften, and the everyday journeys did not go away. What changed is that the cheapest, most personal way to serve them now lives in conversation, and the fixed app you used to build is no longer the obvious home for most of them. Apps are not dead; they are becoming the engine room while the relationship moves somewhere the customer already is.

If you are rethinking where your customer experience should live, this is exactly the shift Merx was built for. We help retail and beauty brands run marketing, sales, and service journeys inside conversational channels like WhatsApp, working alongside the CRM and commerce systems you already own. Come compare notes with us, and we will show you which of your journeys are ready to move.