I guess some people think about it differently than others. I don't see a properly applied ML as taking away control - I see it as reinforcing your control. ML as applied to UIs should be about your conversation with the app (and nothing else, no cloud bullshit please).

I haven't seen any actual adaptivity in Inbox by Google. The interface is static, it's just different than ordinary GMail. Is there something I've missed?

To address your example of sorting apps. This is a dumb idea mostly because - as you said - it interferes with habit-forming. Not that anyone cares these days, I can't find many examples where people would remember to not rearrange stuff like context menus pointlessly. But I think it could work as an addition. Instead of resorting your icons, just have a (small) area with, say, 5 apps most relevant contextually. This is something I'd actually pay to use. Hell, long long time ago I backed a project for an Android tablet homescreen that was supposed to rearrange visible widgets depending on your location and time of day. Great idea, but they fucked up execution (honestly, for such a project MVP is not enough, it gains utility per feature added in a superlinear fashion). I'd pay for something like this again.

> At the risk of generalizing (but reinforcing the patterns thinking), it's a common pattern with Engineers to apply a solution on all kinds of problems without challenging the efficacy of said solutions for those problems.

Hey, I'm not asking for a product like this to be built for general population. GenPop has plenty of flashy shiny apps already. I wish that someone would build a tool for a subset of engineers who think the way I do. The market is big enough to facilitate that. And apparently unwilling to cater for niches.