I wish this is the point at which we could create a true alternative to the app stores. This is the moment we could escape the walled gardens. Yes a lot of those who are happy in their ecosystems will stay, but for the ones making the apps, I think there are better alternatives, especially now with PWAs. I think now more than ever is an opportunity to invest in a PWA based mini app platform.
App Store sees 84% surge in new apps as AI coding tools take off
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Re: App Store sees 84% surge in new apps as AI coding tools take off
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
To me this is fair. If you vibe code something and try to pass it off as your own work people will be angry about the deception.
Do you have to know Assembler to be able to write code in Java? With the point being that you rarely know the underlying mechanics - and the same if true for vibe coding.
Nah, but you have to actually put the work in to get the credit. Lazily vibe coding slop and then passing it off as your work is like claiming you cooked a microwave meal.
Re: App Store sees 84% surge in new apps as AI coding tools take off
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
To me this is fair. If you vibe code something and try to pass it off as your own work people will be angry about the deception.
I don't love seeing slop everywhere and I don't feel good about models being trained on people's hard work, but... I also have a hard time believing my work was ever much different. I've always regurgitated and synthesized existing solutions. I took them from open source examples. I read people's blogs. I'm basically a really slow LLM most of the time. Is that a form of deception too? I really wonder how much of a di…
No, building on top of other peoples work is fine. Taking credit for work you didn't do is not the same.
Re: App Store sees 84% surge in new apps as AI coding tools take off
#34The world has been given hay making machines. Now people of all walks of life can make their own hay at a greater rate and with much less effort. They can also proudly display them along with other examples in centralized locations that conceptually take the form of haystacks. Also, I should add, the machines tend to make the hay with the color of a needle and with a needle shape.
Re: App Store sees 84% surge in new apps as AI coding tools take off
#35Instantly, I don't want to look at the App Store anymore.
Re: App Store sees 84% surge in new apps as AI coding tools take off
#36My dad was a software engineer when he was younger, but his skills atrophied over the decades as he worked his way into upper management and spent all of his non work time caring for the family. For the past 8 years or he's had an app idea for something he wants himself on his phone that he's been dying to make, but just didn't have the means to do it. He tried no code/lo code options, but they were just to limited i…
This is one of the cases where I do think AI development is handy. There are loads of simple apps (like in your example, an alarm with custom sounds) that someone could crank out if they take a couple weeks to learn some frameworks and a language. Or they could get some ad-filled slop app from the App Store that'll harvest their personal data and send it off to some foreign intelligence agency to spy on them and share it with spammers. Neither option is appealing to most people.
But AI can churn it out in a few minutes, and a human can go in to tweak things manually to their needs.
I recently did it with a little audio editing app. I needed something to edit sound effects for a game in a specific way. Learning about audio programming and whatever would've taken me a lot of time, and I put it off forever since even figuring out where to begin was a hassle. I asked an AI to make a basic app that did what I wanted and I put on a few finishing touches. Took about 10 minutes and works fine for my purposes.
Re: App Store sees 84% surge in new apps as AI coding tools take off
#37My dad was a software engineer when he was younger, but his skills atrophied over the decades as he worked his way into upper management and spent all of his non work time caring for the family. For the past 8 years or he's had an app idea for something he wants himself on his phone that he's been dying to make, but just didn't have the means to do it. He tried no code/lo code options, but they were just to limited i…
I'm curious to check the app out, waking up with nature sound is the only alarm I tolerate!
Re: App Store sees 84% surge in new apps as AI coding tools take off
#38My friend just made an app. The idea sounds really dumb and he keeps asking me to install it. He’s never written a line of code in his life. I’d imagine a lot of the apps are stuff like this. It’s an app that tells you who died today, and who you’ve managed to outlive. Seems really glum and a downer.
My grandparents would have loved this. They spent most of the mornings scanning through obituaries for old friends who had died. Might be one of those bittersweet hobbies you get into when you reach your 80s.
Re: App Store sees 84% surge in new apps as AI coding tools take off
#39What the comments here fail to understand is that even if 80% of these is vibecoded slop, 20% of them isn't (classic Pareto), and that's still a ~17% increase of non-slop. Quite a lot.
An LLM being used to generate the code doesn't say anything inherent about the quality of the app. It just changes the distribution. It's like how knowing a person is a man makes it a lot more like they're into watching team sports, but it doesn't mean they actually are. Or that a woman isn't. As of April 2026, an app's code being primarily LLM written it's a lot more likely to be slop, but there's plenty that aren't slop. Similarly, there were millions of slop apps out there before anyone out there was using LLMs to code.
More and more people will start agreeing with this take and admitting it over time as the Overton Window shifts and it becomes more acceptable. But this has been true for 2 years now. The distribution has shifted, ironically towards a higher % of slop, because 2 years ago harnesses and other tooling weren't good enough yet to allow people with zero coding experience to build an app. It still took more effort, higher barrier. But people were already generating useful code with LLMs, and yes, even creating useful, non-slop, thought out apps whose code was majority LLM-generated.
"Show them! Where are they!?". Look at these comment sections, then take a guess why we aren't linking them everywhere and shouting it from the rooftops. Because it hasn't reached mainstream acceptance, so it's bad for business. People immediately associate it with slop, and they're not necessarily wrong in doing so because as said, 80% is slop. So for us 20%, who didn't vibecode something in a day but worked on it for months to produce something actually valuable, all it does is invite negativity with business impact. In offline, informal settings you'll find way more people who are willing to say it and indeed show.
Re: App Store sees 84% surge in new apps as AI coding tools take off
#40Eventually the cost to develop app and games could drop so low that we will need to shift our mental model in how we discover and use apps. For example, TikTok revolutionized short form videos by introduced a UI where users can explore a lot more videos more quickly, and the cost of showing a bad video is significantly lower (then clicking on a long YouTube video). This eventually led to algorithmically led discovery…
There are already more games being released daily than is possible to curate and select what you want to play.
Though I agree with you that what you describe will likely happen, I think that is not the future I will enjoy.