Most people think of documents, reports, and apps as separate worlds – one for reading, one for analyzing, and one for doing. But in reality, the boundaries are artificial and costly. An InfoApp collapses all three into a single, living entity: it delivers the narrative and context of a document, the data depth and filtering of a report, and the interactivity and functionality of an app all in one portable, instantly accessible file. Once you see that these capabilities can coexist without heavy servers, integrations, or infrastructure, the mental divide disappears, and you realize you can deliver richer content, faster, to more people, at a fraction of the cost.
Here is how the InfoApp takes the best of all three and alchemically fuses them into a new powerful format:
The idea to combine Document + Report + App into one format is hard because each sits in a different mental “bucket” shaped by decades of software, workflows, and even job roles, which in tern perpetuates a cycle of resource drain. Here is how these mental models were shaped:
1. Legacy silos in thinking and tooling
- Documents are seen as static, authored artifacts (Word, PDF) made for reading and archiving.
- Reports live in BI tools (Tableau, Power BI) and are associated with analysts, metrics, and dashboards.
- Apps are thought of as interactive, transactional tools built by developers. These categories have been taught, sold, and reinforced as separate product types for years.
2. Different owners and processes
- Documents → owned by content teams or comms.
- Reports → owned by analysts or finance.
- Apps → owned by IT/development.
This split means no single team is incentivized (or resourced) to merge them.
3. Technology constraints of the past
- For a long time, file formats, data storage, and hosting requirements made it expensive or impractical to have portability, analytics, and interactivity in the same package.
- The “offline + interactive + data-rich” combo simply wasn’t technically viable for most businesses without huge budgets.
4. Cognitive bias from old tools
- People think “interactive” means “must be a web app” and “portable” means “must be a PDF.”
- They don’t imagine a middle ground because the tools they use every day keep those worlds separate.
5. Market positioning from vendors
- Software vendors made money selling specialized tools for each function, so they didn’t push for convergence.
- The ecosystem was built to keep these as distinct categories.
It is time to change the mental model, and move to distributed tech like InfoApps to save time and money by eliminating technology complexity.