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

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

#51

Post by robgough »

tclancy wrote: post #42
yacin wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

could you talk more about the hoops? i’m getting close to the point i’d like to release something and it’d be my first time.

Do you want to release it to the general public or just a circle of friends and family? TestFlight lets you have up to a hundred users forever without ever truly releasing. I have a couple of home-relevant apps I am managing that way.

I think that's a fair question. For this app I didn't see the harm in releasing it. You have to pay for the account etc. to get it onto TestFlight anyway, so I might as well just put it out there. And avoids me having to resubmit every 90 days. There also wasn't a lot of custom "me" stuff in this one, but I could see going that route for other apps in the future.

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

#52

Post by satvikpendem »

tasuki wrote: post #19
pedalpete wrote: post #18

So a bit different from the other comments. We're a wearable company which of course pairs with an app. We built iOS first because that's what most of our users have, though the team is mostly on Android. We built our logic in Rust, so that compiles cross platform. It's really just the UI layer that is per platform. Though I had initially written our first demo in React-Native, the team wanted to go with native UI. L…

> We built our logic in Rust, so that compiles cross platform. It's really just the UI layer that is per platform. Having never created a mobile app, how's that work exactly?

FFI. For example in Flutter, there are packages like flutter_rust_bridge that allow you to write Rust that then interacts with the host OS.

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

#53

Post by satvikpendem »

Larrikin wrote: post #31

LLMs so far have just been another tool to use. As an Android developer, KMP is the bigger development. It seems mature enough now that if I want to build an app as a single dev I feel confident that I could get the iOS version out at the same time. They seem to be avoiding the mistakes of Xamarin and Flutter

What are the mistakes in your mind? And isn't Compose Multiplatform basically Flutter?

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

#54

Post by robgough »

overgard wrote: post #24
robgough wrote: post #6

I had a go at building both a Mac and iOS dictation app the other day (dictator.robgough.net) thinking that with Claude's input, this probably wouldn't work... but it was a real problem I had, and I wanted to see how far we could get. Best way to learn the tools, right? I'd already spent the day playing with alternative apps that didn't quite do what I wanted. The app itself is fairly straightforward, but it included…

I mean, in general I dislike some of the more extreme app store gating.. but if apps are getting vibe coded with little effort I think gatekeeping is more important than ever. I think "is the author willing to put in the work to pass review" might be a useful heuristic, and it could also prevent things like vulnerable software being published. Plus it amuses me to imagine big tech having to deal with the slop apocaly…

Review times have already spiked, apparently, although I've never found them particularly good. There used to be a third-party website that tracked this via user submissions, though that was shut down when they made genuine efforts to improve timings several years ago as it was deemed no longer neccesary.

I think it's a fair criticism that there will be a lot of people putting "lower-quality" apps on there. I do think Claude did a better job of this than I would have managed. It certainly seems to work well enough.

I do believe Apple will have to rethink exactly what they want to gatekeep and why. If nothing else, in the context of allowing people to get more out of their powerful devices. For example, I wish my iPad Pro could actually do more useful things with it's M4 processor. Hopefully that's something the new CEO has on his list.

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

#55

Post by nulledy »

tetris11 wrote: post #11
afavour wrote: post #10

I suspect AI is going to result in the bottom falling out of the market for simple apps. React made simple webapps a case of just gluing dependencies together and much more approachable to a generalist developer than the previous generation of web development was. But native apps weren’t affected in the same way. With AI I suspect we’ll see a lot of simple apps, the ones that really aren’t doing much other than CRUD…

Will the complex apps be discoverable though, and if not, will the devs bother at all? I feel like this would be a win for old-school open source, where people would do it for the love of the aim, and better vetted app stores like F-Droid might win out

Surprisingly I'm seeing a rapid increase of discoverability for my apps FROM LLMs. The flood of Claude/ChatGPT users finding my apps right after I get a basic site up, before I've told anyone it exists, is astonishing.

If you are solving a problem users are searching for, you will be found and found faster than ever via LLMs.

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

#56

Post by pan69 »

archagon wrote: post #48
CharlesW wrote: post #15

My perspective: I've been supporting and working with Mac and iOS developers since the last century, when Apple moved me from Chicago to be an evangelist at Apple HQ in Cupertino. I know as much as anyone about AI-assisted app development, as the creator/maintainer of the free/open source Axiom ( https://charleswiltgen.github.io/Axiom/ ) for iOS/macOS devs. It's not as dire as you might think. To software developers,…

AI is not an abstraction. I still can’t believe engineers are making this basic, definitional mistake.

If not an abstraction, how would you describe it then?

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

#57

Post by archagon »

pan69 wrote: post #56
archagon wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI is not an abstraction. I still can’t believe engineers are making this basic, definitional mistake.

If not an abstraction, how would you describe it then?

I don't know? It's an agent, an automated contractor, a black box that produces work. When you pay someone to help write your app, you don't call that an "abstraction."

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

#58

Post by kowskirz »

A good analogy (I think) is photography. Everyone has a camera, but only a fraction of human beings with a camera are professional photographers. AI is to App Development, what the smartphone is to Photography. Anyone can do it, yet paradoxically, only a few people really "do".

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

#59

Post by victorbjorklund »

archagon wrote: post #57
pan69 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If not an abstraction, how would you describe it then?

I don't know? It's an agent, an automated contractor, a black box that produces work. When you pay someone to help write your app, you don't call that an "abstraction."

AI isn’t someone. And sure instead of building X I can of course bring in Y that abstracts away X.
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