App Store sees 84% surge in new apps as AI coding tools take off

https://9to5mac.com/2026/04/06/app-store-sees-84-surge-in-new-apps-as-ai-coding-tools-take-off/

by gardaani • 3 months ago

66 74 3 months ago

johng• 3 months ago

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.

slopinthebag5• 3 months ago

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.

steve_adams_863• 3 months ago

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 difference it is sometimes. Maybe LLMs are just a shortcut of sorts to get where we've previously gotten using very similar means. Just absorbing and recycling ideas, learning by reinforcement, so on.

woah• 3 months ago

Who cares?

podnami• 3 months ago

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.

DeepYogurt• 3 months ago

Are any of them good?

steve_adams_863• 3 months ago

In my experience no, but I don't think that's a problem.

It's fascinating to see so many ideas and so much enthusiasm. I sometimes wonder if the fervor will die down as people realize it's still really hard to make truly fantastic software, but it's hard to say. There's a ton of inertia behind the vibe coding rush.

I also wonder if vibe coding is actually somewhat incompatible with the states of mind and contemplation that's often required to figure out how to solve problems properly. It isn't clear if you can brute force great solutions without putting in the initial domain distillation and idea incubation and so on. I'm sure there are exceptions but I have a feeling it'll never be trivial to come up with truly good and novel ideas for software, and vibing to get there might not make it any easier.

insin• 3 months ago

/r/chrome_extensions feels like it's getting close to being 100% LLM generated, extension code, submission descriptions which read like you accidentally went to LinkedIn, and generic LLM replies

datadrivenangel• 3 months ago

I didn't trust any of the chrome history extensions so Claude Code made me one in five minutes...

nebula8804• 3 months ago

Ha! I got raked over the coals when I asked for some help in a vintage Apple subreddit. I described the problem, what I tried to do to solve it and at the very end I also mentioned that I asked AI and that it gave me an absurd answer. So many people just read the one line and gave me an earful.

add-sub-mul-div• 3 months ago

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

hirako2000• 3 months ago

That's what's so surprising about the chase to solve the coding problem.

It's never been a problem. Not even where the steep cost is.

saltyoldman3• 3 months ago

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.

locknitpicker2• 3 months ago

For your hypothesis to hold, you need to explain how your 1-person unicorn expects to get funded for their app when some guy with a $20 subscription can just as easily churn the same app or better.

deaux5• 3 months ago

Unicorn is indeed an exaggeration but 1-5M ARR doesn't need funding. Most in that range weren't VC funded, as by VC metrics that's considered a failure and they shut down if they can't get past it.

bediger4000• 3 months ago

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?

rglover• 3 months ago

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.

Tade02• 3 months ago

I downloaded a cake sort game to my phone for my daughter, thinking it's the same vendor as for the one on her mom's iPad.

Nope. Unrelated company - just looks the same.

Shovelware, but a snow shovel, not a regular one.

gpt52• 3 months ago

There are companies that sell premade games you can buy and distribute.

bentcorner• 3 months ago

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).

paulpauper• 3 months ago

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.

kristiandupont• 3 months ago

..assuming that those roles will be performed by humans, that is.

jerojero• 3 months ago

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.

prerok2• 3 months ago

...and they are going to use LLMs to generate their reviews ;)

wincy• 3 months ago

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.

laszlojamf• 3 months ago

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.

hexasquid• 3 months ago

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

EZ-E• 3 months ago

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.

ogou• 3 months ago

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?

pacificpendant2• 3 months ago

The article is relatively clear that it is an assumption that the apps are vibe-coded based on the jump being so large. I guess they could’ve tried to cross-correlate that with sales of books or courses on app development that vibe-coders wouldn’t need.

There are a few examples of the types of apps people are making in the comments on this page and it sounds like a lot of the time it’s custom apps for a personal itch that might appeal to very few other people.

Similar to how I have Python scripts on my computer that I won’t publish. They’re not production quality, but I know how to deal with their quirks. I suspect a lot of the apps mentioned in the comments are similar and maybe that’s fine.

I imagine some of the rise is people using AI to clone existing apps too.

DeathArrow• 3 months ago

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.

CitrusFruits2• 3 months ago

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".

kdheiwns• 3 months ago

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.

romanoonhn• 3 months ago

I'm curious to check the app out, waking up with nature sound is the only alarm I tolerate!

j_bum• 3 months ago

+1, I’d love to see the app.

sph• 3 months ago

Boomers are back into the workforce, baby!

rawgabbit• 3 months ago

What AI driven platform did he use to create the app?

gpt52• 3 months ago

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.

BoorishBears• 3 months ago

Lots of people have tried this and most recently TikTok is trying to become TikTok for games by showing 0 install games in the feed

prerok2• 3 months ago

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.

aytigra• 3 months ago

Many game ads on ios are already playable, I guess we're just one step away from what you describe.

certyfreak• 3 months ago

same for android

asim• 3 months ago

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.

jimjimjim• 3 months ago

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.

bottom999mottob• 3 months ago

This analogy almost works, except about a fifth the hay making machines' output is needles.

cyberjunkie• 3 months ago

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

baq• 3 months ago

Interesting, I made me think when was the last time I wanted to look at the App Store and it was… never? I mean I have to to install something, but I never go there just to window shop. (My kids do, but that’s because the games have video previews.)

deaux5• 3 months ago

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.

spwa4• 3 months ago

You fail to take into account that both the Apple app store AND the Google Play Store are very far along in enshittifying.

You will never be shown the apps you want. Only the apps that maximally exploit your wallet. There will be attempt after attempt after attempt to make you click the revenue generating apps instead. Do an experiment. Search of "OpenAI ChatGPT" on the App Store and the Play Store.

Play Store: can I just start with making the remark that now even Google has decided allowing for search is wasting money. I mean. At least their search works (as opposed to ...), but obviously they don't want you to search for an app. They also openly deceive their users. The search on the web is very different in results from the on-device search (which is at least easier to find, but works way worse and this just isn't an accident)

Top links the search returns on mobile: "Praktika - AI Language Tutor" "Open Chat - AI bot app" (with an icon very close to ChatGPT), then the actual ChatGPT app, then "ChatOn - AI Chat Bot Assistant" (also with an obviously deceptive icon)

The Apple App Store is the same shit. Obviously Apple is no longer about actually giving users the Apps they want, but the apps that make maximum money for Apple.

deaux5• 3 months ago

In one of the niches I'm in, the top apps that do rank above us are entirely free (we're freemium), so that doesn't entirely track. Your premise holds some merit, but it's not as extreme as you're saying besides extremely saturated fields.

All you're saying is really "app store search is not a viable day 1 strategy for user acquisition". In general you're right! It also has nothing to do with my comment, I didn't "fail to take it into account" because it's completely unrelated to my comment. Which is about this headline also including a significant increase of non-slop, good apps, whereas (at time of writing) this comment section mostly pretends it's all slop.

HasjG16• 3 months ago

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.

drukenemo• 3 months ago

That sounds fun and interesting! Where can I download your app?

mclightning• 3 months ago

That is not a real account.

Tsarp• 3 months ago

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

roland_nilsson• 3 months ago

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

ChrisArchitect• 3 months ago

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...

Gud• 3 months ago

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.

Leftium• 3 months ago

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

SJetKaran• 3 months ago

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

App Store sees 84% surge in new apps as AI coding tools take off

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