There has been something very interesting happening in the mobile space for months now and very few people have noticed it. You see, for years now, the mobile landscape has been following the exact same path the web took a decade ago. Almost every trend we see in mobile can be traced back to something we saw on the web in the past.

This is true for search, it is true for advertising, monetization in general, and the latest trend, deep consolidation of apps. Different people call this trend different things. “App unbundling” “App Constellations“, and just “Consolidation” but whatever you want to call it, this is a trend that should not be ignored by any mobile publisher or company working in the space.

Some of the companies leading this trend include Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Foursquare, Dropbox, Facebook, and of course, Apple. So what is this trend exactly?

Very simply put, the big companies are taking over your phone’s home screen like they did to your computer’s bookmarks a decade ago. Open your iPhone or Android device at any given moment and you will notice something very interesting. Well, that is assuming you are somewhat of an advanced mobile user. If you’re not, then you will see this trend soon but as always, this can be seen clearly with early adopters first.

Take Dropbox, for example. I used to have one Dropbox app on my phone that I would use to back up and access my files. Now? I have four. Dropbox, Mailbox, Carousel, and Loom. Google? Search, Drive, Docs, Gmail, Inbox, Google+, and Google Authenticator. Facebook? Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, Paper, Pages, and the list goes on and on.

So, how does this affect the ecosystem? Well, for starters, similar to the way there were portals of content on the web in the past, now we are seeing the same phenomenon in apps. Think Yahoo and all the services you can access from the home page. Same thing goes for Google. As far as the user experience is concerned, this apps are for all intents and purposes one app network. That means that the user does not have to log in ten times but rather, one single log in for all these apps. It also means that the whole deep linking thing becomes a lot more seamless.

What is deep linking? Well, it is the hot new topic in mobile and rightfully so. When you click a link on the web, where does it bring you? To that link, correct? That is not the case with apps, or at least it wasn’t until companies like Deeplink brought this ability to thousands of mobile developers. What would traditionally happen in mobile is that you would tap a link in an app leading to another app, and it would launch the second app, but not jump you into the specific page. That means a far worse user experience and it also means much lower conversions when it comes to mobile advertising.

However, if you are one single network of apps, cross promotion with deep linking becomes a whole lot more intuitive and easy to deliver.

On a much higher level, this whole trend of app constellations also means that mobile publishers are going to try a lot harder to acquire users. The rich get richer and the big companies get bigger and more dominant on your home screen.

All of this will of course be magnified in the coming years as independent mobile publishers begin to leverage APIs to build out a strong ecosystem for their apps. The most recent example is Slack that just raised a whopping $120m for its mobile communication app that only launched one year ago.

What is interesting about Slack is that it is not just an app but it offers teams hundreds of integrations that they can use to improve the way they communicate. So Slack itself is somewhat of a network of apps, if you think about it.

We will be seeing a lot more of these types of stories when medium size mobile developers realize they cannot just release one app and expect to compete with companies like Google or Yahoo that are buying smaller companies every day to increase the strength of the app constellations. At the end of the day, this is a positive trend since it encourages innovation but make no mistake about it, for the near future, mobile developers are going to have to work a lot harder to be discovered, retain users, and effectively monetize their apps!