[pdonis]

Exactly. I think the obvious answer to the author's question is that apps are verbs and people (and documents) are nouns, and when people are trying to use a tool it's the verbs that start the process.

The real problem, which the author does not discuss even though it's implicit in some of his examples, is that many of the apps on a typical phone (or desktop computer, for that matter) aren't the right verbs; they're verbs that were easy for the programmer to program, not verbs that are easy for the user to use. You fix that by making better apps, not by switching from app-centric to people-centric design.