App Store sees 84% surge in new apps as AI coding tools take off (opens in new tab)

My 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 in their API coverage. Finally though in the past 3 months he's been able to fulfill his own personal dream to make that app with an AI driven platform. He has been thrilled and I think he's done a great job developing it. It's an incredibly niche audience and he knows that, but just thought I'd share that for some people out there it's legitimately a dream come true to be able to make and publish an app, while still being clear eyed that it's not going to make you any money.

For those that are curious, it is an alarm app with natures sounds instead of dings and beeps or jingles. As he puts it "none of the other existing apps have good enough sounds or interfaces".

My 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.

Eventually 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 and content that was created for that format.

You could easily imagine a TikTok for games, where you can instantly scroll between and start playing games with no installation or frictions. Over time games themselves would be designed for that format, hooking you up from the first second (like a TikTok video).

This would obviously change apps and games fundumenltally, just like TikTok did for videos.

This just explained the "who's on first" my wife and I went through trying to find the right wood block game. They're all nearly identical, even copying/cloning exact UIs, labels, etc.

102 year old chiming in: I was a software engineer in the 1970s and lost the will to program. After watching tech podcasts like the one from the author of the article, I vibe coded a calorie tracking app for my dog, which is in all app stores.

Life is fun again. I feel energized and productive with my intellectual wheelchair.

This article seems to be a counterpoint to a recent HN post asking "So where are all the AI apps?"[1]

- This was pointed out in a thread: https://hw.leftium.com/#/item/47504047

[1]: https://hw.leftium.com/#/item/47503006

Not one actual app is mentioned. As with most articles that are about this, few if any public facing examples are described. Where are the lists of actual production software that was vibe coded and also successful?

So curation and marketing are going to become more important than ever.

Which means influencers, tech bloggers, etc. are going to be seeing a lot more business coming their way.

30% is a surprising metric because just anecdotally my team's PR submissions have jumped by about the same ratio in the same time frame. (No, I'm not measuring it - I just own a downstream piece and have casually observed its higher rate of use).

"I'm going to put this fire over with the rest of the fire" but in app form

Many programmers("software developers") believe they have the final say on what an application should be like, and they were mostly right before the advent of LLM assisted software development.

I started programming as a child, although I was more interested in system administration.

Today I work as a high voltage test engineer on new substations. I do partial discharge measurements mostly on green field sites.

I have developed amazing tools for myself, software that I could only dream of having that would have taken years of cat herding and millions of dollars, and still not be quite what I wanted. I am a competent programmer, but I don't have the time. I have the ideas, I even know how to do it, but I already work 50-60 hours a week.

Now I can ping pong my ideas with chatgpt and claude and get something useful out of it, all in the background.

The only thing that leaves a bad taste in my mouth, is that this technology is owned by at best neutral corporations. I want to host it myself, but I can't pay the money, which sucks.

What 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.

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.

The 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.

Finally! The tsunami of incredibly useful, "AI" coded apps we've been waiting for. This is really good news.

Anybody categorized these apps? I mean, there were literally hundreds of flashlight apps in the Google android store at one point. Are "AI" apps doing variants of one thing, or are they all over the map?

This is also the reason why we need to ensure our OS systems remain open, so that we can craft the super customized app for our needs, and be able to install it on our devices easily

More apps means mean more employees whose job it is to screen apps, and dealing with customer issues. This defies the popular narrative that AI will result in a net loss of jobs.

Instantly, I don't want to look at the App Store anymore.

Sure a most of these apps are "slop" and will never achieve any kind of success. However a small percentage will eventually flourish into businesses which will eventually starts hiring developers and other roles.

Increased enablement and higher productivity leads to greater output which will eventually lead to greater need for (some types) of tech workers in the end.

I don't see it as a negative. If even 0.1% of the influx of the new vibe coded apps are useful, that is still a good thing.

Scale strikes again. As with most things around AI the problem is the scale. The scale of impact is immense, the app store is flooded with slop, and we're not ready to handle it.

A take from Forbes a few weeks ago,

The App Store Is Flooded with AI Slop, Legitimate Developers Are Paying for It

https://www.forbes.com/sites/josipamajic/2026/03/24/the-appl...

One negative side to this is the time taken to review apps has gone up drastically.

I've been watching the /r/cli and /r/tui subreddits for some time. The amount of vibe coded apps posted there just continues to climb. Some people in the comments for these apps can be quite rude when they read the description and find out its vibe coded. Nevermind how vile some can be when it's not in the announcement but the author lets them know down the line in the comments.

We already had a shovelware problem in these stores before AI.

While the news may seem inconsequential, many people keep saying "where are all the new apps".

There you go. Your apps are here. Even if 95% go nowhere, some will become 1 person unicorns, perhaps 1 - 3 million ARR companies. If you're wondering if anyone gets rich off AI, it's that 5% of people that couldn't write it before - well they can now with a $20 subscription.

Much needed, as we only had 450,000 apps to choose from before. /s