I like this thought experiment from Matt Webb positing that spreadsheets could (and should!) be an alternate interface to apps — a power UI that gives someone a data level view of their apps that are abstracted away by so much conventional interface.

How about an app with a spreadsheet under the hood?

Like, the experience would be this: you’re using your photos app or Zoom or expense filing SaaS tool, then you go to Settings and scroll aaaaall the way to the bottom, and tap a power user button that says “Open Spreadsheet.”

Then, magically, Google Sheets opens with all your data in it, and you can sort and query it in all the ways you couldn’t before, and change the titles of your expense claims with spreadsheet functions and that all gets reflected back into the app, or build a callout to an AI to describe all your photos and add natural language tags, do it yourself or ask a friend who knows Excel functions, or whatever really. Anything the app developers didn’t add because they’re building for the 80% use case, and you’re building just for you

This is a bit of an inversion of what apps like Airtable or Notion or even Retool offer and, as Webb notes, of the way APIs work generally. With something like a Google sheets interface you could remix several apps and even your friends data. I like it!

Just to complete the ouroboros, it seems like it would actually be possible to build this using those various APIs. Like Zappier but with rows and cells. Or even simpler, just a bunch of open source functions in a GitHub repo.