Being phased out by what?
It's by James Whittaker. Basically people are downloading and using way less apps than a few years ago. Today to get the users to use something it has to be sortof built-in the ecosystem in an other way then simply forcing someone to go search for and download a specific app.
e.g. Google Play Music replaced spotify for me when I used android. It can now play podcasts (like Apple's podcasts app) and also recognize music playing (like Shazam). Google's Inbox replaced Dropbox's mailbox. Google Map has a lot of features I used to find in Waze, even some extra ones (like Timeline). etcetc
It reminds me of what Microsoft used to do: embrace, extend, extinguish.
I guess they still do it on the enterprise level. But they have fallen behind in terms of consumer ecosystem.