Katie Benner, Columnist

Now Every App Is Called 'Uber for ...'

We need on-demand services. Maybe not this many.

May 26, 2015 at 1:00 PM UTC

Katie Benner is a Bloomberg View columnist who writes about technology, innovation, and the cult and culture of Silicon Valley. She lives in San Francisco. Benner previously wrote a tech and finance column for the Information. She has worked at Fortune, TheStreet.com and CNN Money, and was a freelance writer based in China covering culture, business and politics. She has a bachelor's degree in English from Bowdoin College.

Lyft. It's like Uber for, um, cars.
Photographer: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

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I had a lot of things to mail last week, so I tried to download an app called Shyp, which would let me summon a courier to pick up and mail my packages. But I couldn’t get Shyp because I've maxed out my phone's storage capacity with lots of other apps that let me call for food, car rides and cleaning services. I'll probably delete Netflix to make some room, since watching "West Wing" reruns is less important to me than avoiding a trip to the post office.

My phone -- which I once used for photos, music, email and maps -- is now crammed full of apps for on-demand services. It's just one sign of the crazy boom in companies that want to turn our phones into remote controls for the real world.