Apps are dumb — and VanMoof is the proof
A €3,500 paperweight
VanMoof is bankrupt.
Horrible? Yup, but don’t worry, there’s a moral in all this. And by moral, I mean newsletter. Specifically, this newsletter.
Why? Because the company’s downfall is the perfect parable to explain one of tech’s biggest shitpiles: the app.
Let’s rewind.
VanMoof is — sorry, was — a Dutch ebike brand. More than that, it was, arguably, the ebike brand.
Its goal of becoming the Tesla of the mobility world caught the media’s attention, and countless words were written about them (many of them by me).
VanMoof received huge amounts of funding and it made ebikes, well, cool.
That was until it started fucking up.
Recent years saw issues with delivery and waiting lists, build quality, customer service, and more.
With all this, the events that led to VanMoof’s bankruptcy (you can read about that here and here) seemed somewhat inevitable.
Yet financial misadventure isn’t what this edition of The Rectangle is about. Instead, what this VanMoof saga has proven is that apps are horrible and dumb and should stay far away from physical objects.
Here’s the kicker: to use the full capabilities of a VanMoof bike, you need to use its app.
The problem? With the bankruptcy this may disappear.
In basic terms, to unlock the ebike you need a keycode. This constantly changes and requires the app to connect to VanMoof’s servers for authentication.
But — shock! horror! — if the company ceases existing, then it’s not paying for this service.
People who spent €3,500 on a fancy bike may not be able to ride the fucking thing.
Thankfully for owners, there are ways around this. Not everything is lost.
But it could be.
And that’s what’s so unbearably ridiculous. As a culture, we’ve been Pied-Pipered by the immediate convenience of apps at the risk that everything may come crashing down later.
So many expensive gadgets, from smart lights to robotic vacuums, now don’t come with any way of controlling them besides an app. And the majority of those rely on external servers to run properly.
All it takes is for one of these independent companies to mess up, not have the money to pay hosting costs, and your gorgeous gadget is screwed.
And it’s not like VanMoof is alone — the same thing happened with Boosted, an electric skateboard brand.
This won’t be the last time a premium product brand disappears and users are left swimming through a shit tide.
The only solution I can think of is some sort of standardised app framework. Maybe the creation of a universal, managed hosting and verification system that, if a company goes bust, users can pay a small subscription to use.
But, like all half-baked ideas dreamed up by a fool, this will be way more complicated that it sounds.
And who’s actually gonna build it? Me? Good fucking luck with that, pal.
Until that miraculous day, we’re going to see this VanMoof pattern keep repeating itself: an expensive product that doesn’t need an app to function, only works with it, then the company goes bust, the app stops working, and you now just own an expensive paperweight.
Maybe, just maybe, tech isn’t always the answer to our problems. Sometimes a regular old key is good enough.