The Mac app Arc set out to re-invent the web browser as an “internet computer” app – something which felt more personal and usable than mainstream browsers.
Less than two years later, the company has announced that it’s discontinuing Arc in favor of a new app – Dia – which it is also pitching as the future of internet usage …
Arc may not have challenged the market leaders like Chrome and Safari, but it had generated a loyal and enthusiastic user base on the Mac. The company’s original goal seemed very much in line with the Mac ethos.
We wanted to build something that felt like “your home on the internet” — for work projects, personal life, all the hours you spent in your browser every single day. Something that felt more like a product from Nintendo or Disney than from a browser vendor. Something with taste, care, feeling.
We wanted you to open Arc every morning and think, “This is mine, my space.” And we called this north star vision the “Internet Computer.”
Given the company saw Arc as the future of internet access, it surprised many when it started work on a new app with essentially the same goal, Dia. What will likely come as an even bigger surprise – and disappointment – is that Arc is now being discontinued.
The company’s CEO Josh Miller has today written a lengthy open letter explaining the decision. He said that Arc hadn’t taken off in the way the company hoped, in large part because it had a steep initial learning curve.
A lot of people loved Arc — if you’re here you might just be one of them — and we’d benefitted from consistent, organic growth since basically Day One. But for most people, Arc was simply too different, with too many new things to learn, for too little reward.
That in turn was because it tried to do too much. Many things the company had seen as core features were only used by a tiny minority of users.
While it could have tried to turn Arc into a more accessible app, Miller said they ultimately decided that if you want to a truly simple product, you have to start from scratch. That’s why it’s now focusing exclusively on Dia.
Early on, Scott Forstall told us Arc felt like a saxophone — powerful but hard to learn. Then he challenged us: make it a piano. Something anyone can sit down at and play. This is now the idea behind Dia: hide complexity behind familiar interfaces […]
[Simplicity, speed, and security] are all things that need to be part of a product’s foundation. Not afterthoughts. As we pushed the boundaries of whether this truly was Arc 2.0 last summer, we found that there were shortcomings in Arc that were too large to tackle retroactively, and that building a new type of software (and fast) required a new type of foundation.
Sadly, it won’t be open-sourcing Arc to allow others to continue to develop it. Miller says this is because Arc was built on a development kit that is the company’s “secret sauce,” and it can’t open-source ADK without doing the same with that.
Dia is designed for what Miller sees as a new world which will be AI agent first, web second (shades here of another view expressed today). The app is currently in alpha-testing, and will open next to Arc members. You can read the full letter here.
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