Digimon are GoBots, and maybe Appmon is trying to fix that.
Part Three, the collapse, and what Appmon might be doing
2001 saw the end of Digimon's golden years of having a unified vision. Armor evolution disappears to never real return, leaving the franchise with a host of Digimon stuck classified as a level that was no longer being used. Most of them would be successfully fold in as Adults but the Digimon Story games would position them closer to Perfects, and as for golden armor forms, not even a general consensus emerged if their closer to Perfects or Megas.
At the same time jogress also saw itself sidelined almost completely, no new V-pets were released this year, but when they did Jogress would only be need for a small number of Digimon, and well the last Ryo game would make use of it by 2002 the next big Digimon game “Digimon World 3” had completely abandoned it, along with the standard gameplay model that the Ryo Wonder Swan games and “Digimon World 2” had all shared, once more leaving Digimon without a clear gameplay foundation and making every game out out a gamble as to what kind of game you might get.
At the same time the anime underwent its biggest change yet, abandoning the Adventurer universe, seemingly for good. It was another pillar of stability in the Digimon Universe that was kicked out. Perhaps the biggest kick of all was the lose of Taichi in the anime. As said early on time and energy was put into making him the human face of the franchise with a movie in a theater starting him that followed right into an Anime that put him front and center and put out a manga with a Taichi that looked just like the anime one came out before even the movie. Now anime version was gone, and the manga one only had two more years left, and no new face would arise to be able to shoulder the franchise the way Taichi had manged to. Yet more instability, at a time when Digimon really didn’t need it.
As noted elsewhere Tamers would not do well in sales and this would be the trigger the biggest blow to Digimon's foundation ever, Digimon Frontier want off in a completely new direction to try and save sales and in the process jettisoned the partners, the pets from the show, the main ambassador for the franchise built on the idea of V-pets no longer promotes the pet element. Digimon is damaged as it's foundation completely crumbles and returns to being GoBots. Worse yet it introduces a ton of Digimon tied into an all new evolution system and levels that will never be folded back into the original foundational evolution system and levels. Digimon no longer is has any internal consistencies or baseline expectations to draw and build on. It was just merchandises with a world slapped on as an afterthought like the GoBots.
And that's were Appmon comes in. By establishing that the new creatures are not Digimon it lets Bandai clean shop cutting Appmon from the mess of contractions and unclear direction that has plagued Digimon. Aside from the utter destruction of the foundation created in the late nineties but indecision was baked in from the start of the franchise. For example how nasty is the Digital world? Some of the early lore and the early art style with Digimon often covered in scars and what clothing they have is tattered and worn, but at least as early as “Digimon World” Digimon are shown living peacefully in a small but stable society that requires intervention form the bad guy to brake up. As early as 2000 we have two forms of fusion; Fusion for Omegamon and jogress, why does Omegamon undergo a different kind of fusion? Because. And Digimon has never really stopped adding fusions with tiny differences and all new names xros, biomerge, double spirit evolution and such, all just adding ever more terms and complexity to the franchise for no benefit.
Apmon is free from all that baggage, its free to be new ground zero with a set vision for what it's monsters are, how they grow and interact with humans without it contradicting earlier elements. Of course it also makes it easy to just shunt all the new elements away and not have to bother integrating them with the older lore if they deiced to have Appmon be another temporary complete re-imagining before they do it all over again, at which point they will have chosen to make Digimon GoBots completely.
