Ask HN: What Is the State of App Development in 2026?

AI Coding is great helper but not a substitutue for producing decent looking apps.

Anytime I let lose AI (Both Codex and Claude), they end up producing slop that is overcomplicated, and that looks like a generic tutorial interface. Great for toy apps but not for serious one.

When I do most of the architecture, and use AI to 'fill in the blanks' or just finish some functionality here and there, then AI is great.

The main reason is that it is trained by public code that is mostly tutorials, and simple apps, so AI can't build a great looking one by itself (or it doesn't how to do large apps). But for specific features, it is great.

TLDR: It is still a 'fill in the funcionality here' type of help. Folks that are successful with letting 'multiple agents' running in the background are mostly for backend work where the results are easier to verify.

Also, there is a lot of LARPING in twitter sphere exaggerating what AI can realistically do right now. But I can see how it can affect entry level jobs. AI is still like an CS intern, or very very junior engineer.

Exactly this.

For example the iOS app failed first time as I accidentally used "Free" in the app name, and the app declared support for UIBackgroundModes but they were "unable to locate any features that require persistent audio". The dictation keyboard switched you to the app, then if you left would keep recording... fairly basic and obvious stuff. I could have either gone back and argued the case, or simply rip it out which I opted for.

It's now failed again because: The keyboard extension does not provide any functionality when the "Full Access" setting is toggled off.

Well no, hardly my fault you've locked down the usefulness of third-party keyboards, but now I've added a full keyboard in there so it's a bit more useful without that access. I don't expect any users to ever see this. Admittedly this was more frustrating when that would be a couple days work, not just a quick prompt, to fix.

Good luck with your app. Don't worry too much, you can generally work through their issues... but it can be a slow process. Make sure you leave plenty of time between your submission and when you want to launch!

why was your team against react native? (for mobile app right that goes along with the wearable right?)

you can ship the actual UI stuff in seconds.

you can write your own plugins for anything native and just call it. we have a app that uses many native SDK calls which we write plugins for and call.

not to mention that once the native work is done you can deploy ui level changes and new features, bug fixes to users over OTA.

i’m just an outsider so i know my lane. but

whatever you do, do not allow bike shedding and ultra opinionated tech nerds to derail company vision timelines.

I just do iOS development and my opinion is this: Start with XCode then use an LLM to design and develop it out from there its great. The newer models work great with project files where they used to struggle. Using the Visual Code development tools alongside XCode, claude skills and 3rd party libraries and frameworks with SwiftUI and Swift 5/6 is really convincing me I should make apps full time again. Coding apps has become my dream job.

https://github.com/LeoMobileDeveloper/ios-developer-tools

https://github.com/AvdLee/SwiftUI-Agent-Skill

Android native dev here.

> What is going on in the world of pure IOS/Android app development?

I'll speak only for Android.

I am tired of Google breaking source compatibility with every AndroidX release and remaining on outdated IntelliJ Platform versions in Android Studio.

not too long ago, Google released AGP 9.0, which was a SHOCKWAVE for many Android projects. many compiler plugins' compatibility, including Google's own Protobuf Gradle plugin, took very long to adapt. also, Kotlin Multiplatform received so much damage that a month after release, JetBrains themselves released an AGP 9.0 migration video on YouTube.

and then we have MDC-Android (Views) v. Compose tension. MDC-Android got Material 3 and M3 Expressive components much faster than Compose, and for many you still have to be on alpha Compose Material3 releases... which are more stable than "Stable," somehow. Compose is nice, but I'd swap Material for something else ASAP or use Compose Foundation directly.

> How is AI/LLMs affecting app development?

you have more useless buttons in Android Studio. or, if you are a paying IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate user, you can have Android support in IDEA, which enables ACP agents without sacrificing proper Android support. IDEA Android plugin lags behind AGP upgrades a little, though, but it's fine.

oh, and, you can vibecode Android apps in Google AI Studio with streaming from a Google-hosted device, all without Android Studio.

> what has changed in App Development in the past 2-5 years?

2 years? a lot. 5 years? the world turned upside down! Compose got Stable release 4 years ago.

> What does a career in only app development look like nowadays?

very discouraging. everyone just prefers React "Native". I couldn't find an Android job in two years because it's nowhere to apply to in Ukraine and just recently switched to .NET. guess what? less than a few weeks passed after I updated my Djinni and now I have a few interviews on the next week.