So where are all the AI apps?

Apparently new iOS app submissions jumped by 24% last year:

> According to Appfigures Explorer, Apple's App Store saw 557K new app submissions in 2025, a whopping 24% increase from 2024, and the first meaningful increase since 2016's all-time high of 1M apps.

The chart shows stagnant new iOS app submissions until AI.

Here's a month by month bar chart from 2019 to Feb 2026: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1020964/apple-app-store-...

Also, if you hang out in places with borderline technical people, they might do things like vibe-code a waybar app and proudly post it to r/omarchy which was the first time they ever installed linux in their life.

Though I'd be super surprised if average activity didn't pick up big on Github in general. And if it hasn't, it's only because we overestimate how fast people develop new workflows. Just by going by my own increase in software output and the projects I've taken on over the last couple months.

Finally, December 2025 (Opus 4.5 and that new Codex one) was a big inflection point where AI was suddenly good enough to do all sorts of things for me without hand-holding.

Also using PyPI as a benchmark is incredibly myopic. Github's 2025 Octoverse[0] is more informative. In that report, you can see a clear inflection point in total users[1] and total open source contributions[2].

The report also notes:

> In 2025, 81.5% of contributions happened in private repositories, while 63% of all repositories were public

[0]: https://github.blog/news-insights/octoverse/octoverse-a-new-...

[1]: https://github.blog/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/octoverse-202...

[2]: https://github.blog/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/octoverse-202...

Pre-ChatGPT, in ~2020, there were about 5,000 new packages per month. Starting in 2025 (the actual year agents took off), there is a clear uptick in packages that is consistently about 10,000 or 2X the pre-ChatGPT era.

In general, the rate of increase is on a clear exponential. So while we might not see a step change in productivity, there comes a point where the average developer is in fact 10X productive than before. It just doesn't feel so crazy because it can about in discrete 5% boosts.

I also disagree with the dataset being a good indicator of productivity. I wouldn't actually suspect the number of packages or the frequency of updates to track closely with productivity. My first order guess would that AI would actually be deflationary. Why spend the time to open source something that AI can gen up for anyone on a case by case basis specific to the project. it takes a certain level of dedication and passion for a person to open source a project and if the AI just made it for them, then they haven't actually made the investment of their time and effort to make them feel justified in publishing the package.

The metrics I would expect to go up are actually the size of codebases, the number of forks of projects that create hyper customized versions of tools and libraries, and other metrics like that.

Overall, I'd predict AI is deflationary on the number of products that exist. If AI removes the friction involved with just making a custom solution, then the amount of demand for middleman software should actually fall as products vertically integrate and reduce dependencies.

Like I've been making things, and making changes to things, but I haven't published any of that because, well they're pretty specific to my needs. There are also things which I won't consider publishing for now, even if generally useful because, well the moat has moved from execution effort to ideas, and we all want to maintain some kind of moat to boost our market value (while there's still one). Everyone has reasonable access to the same capabilities now, so everyone can reasonably make what they need according to their exact specs easily, quickly and cheaply.

So while there are many things being made with AI, there is ever-decreasing reasons to publish most of it. We're in an era of highly personalized software, which just isn't worth generalizing and sharing as the effort is now greater than creating from scratch or modifying something already close enough.