Jorge InfoBits 20260922: The MicroApp

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September 22, 2026

The MicroApp Opportunity & Challenge

By Jorge Pereira

AI Adoption & Technology Strategy | Helping people and organizations turn AI, automation, and emerging technologies into practical business outcomes | Workplace Transformation

In the last issue of Jorge InfoBits — Stop Asking How Smart AI Is, I wrote about why I think we need to look beyond simply comparing which AI model is smartest. My latest post, AI Routing: The Layer Between You and the Models, adds another piece to that discussion. As AI systems increasingly decide which model or combination of models should handle a task, the model itself becomes only one part of a much larger system.

But there is another change happening that I find just as interesting: AI isn’t only changing how we use software. It is changing who can create it.

For years, when we needed a new capability, the answer was often another application, another SaaS platform, another account, and probably another monthly subscription. AI-assisted development is changing that equation. Increasingly, an individual can describe a small problem and build a focused application specifically to solve it.

I have been calling these MicroApps: small, purpose-built applications designed to do one thing well without becoming another platform. This is particularly interesting for small businesses, solopreneurs, and personal productivity, where someone who would never have considered themselves a software developer can now build useful tools for tracking customers, managing schedules, organizing information, or simplifying repetitive work.

Since the beginning of my AI journey about three years ago, I have been creating, using, and helping others use small personal productivity helpers of all kinds. Honestly, it is fun! There is something very satisfying about identifying a small problem or repetitive task and creating a simple tool that solves it without turning it into a major software project.

Now I have taken that experimentation a little further and launched the 35sites MicroApps project. The idea is simple: focused applications with no accounts to create, no servers to maintain, and no subscription just to keep using the tool. The applications run locally in the browser and keep their data with the user.

To me, this is citizen development becoming much more accessible. A small business owner, solopreneur, or individual can identify a need and increasingly participate in creating the tool that solves it.

But there is another side to this.

In the enterprise, hundreds or thousands of employees creating their own small applications can quickly introduce questions about security, data governance, support, compliance, duplication, and lifecycle management. The same freedom that makes MicroApps powerful for an individual or small business can become a governance challenge at scale.

That tension is what I explored in two recent articles:

• Sometimes We Don’t Need Another Platform — why small, focused applications may sometimes be a better answer than adding another large platform.
• The Enterprise Challenge of MicroApps — what happens when citizen development and AI-assisted application creation begin spreading across the enterprise.

I don’t think the answer is to discourage people from building. Quite the opposite. The ability for more people to create their own tools could become one of the more practical impacts of AI. The challenge is figuring out how to embrace that creativity without losing visibility, security, and governance along the way.

That is a conversation I think we are only beginning to have.

One More Thing: AI Crawlers

Another topic I have been digging into is AI crawlers. In AI Crawlers Are Not All the Same, I looked at why we shouldn’t treat every AI crawler as if it were doing the same thing. Some may be collecting information for model training, others retrieving current information for a user, and increasingly some may be working on behalf of AI agents.

An interesting LinkedIn conversation after I published the article pushed the idea a little further. The discussion came down to three things: granularity, enforcement, and machine readability. Website owners may want much more precise control over what AI systems can access and for what purpose, but expressing a preference is not the same as enforcing it. And if these policies are going to become more sophisticated, they also need to be understandable by machines.

I think we are still very early in figuring out what meaningful permissions between websites and AI systems should actually look like.

This Issue of the newsletter was also published on Linkedin here and on Substack Jorge TechBites here

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About This Edition

Beyond the AI Hype — Short, practical, and sometimes opinionated insights about using AI as a working partner—connecting knowledge, improving everyday workflows, protecting privacy, and exploring what becomes possible with local, private, and cloud AI.

About Jorge

I’m Jorge Pereira — a technology strategist, advisor, mentor, and lifelong technologist focused on AI, technology transformation, and helping people and organizations understand what’s next and put it to practical use.

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