Marco Pérez had long wanted to read all of the news he was curious about in one place. This year, he used artificial intelligence tools to get the job done fast.
Mr. Pérez, a software engineer in Chicago who had never made a mobile app before, spent five weeks over the winter tinkering with “vibecoding” A.I. tools to create a prototype, and two more preparing the app for Apple’s App Store. The app, InfoDrizzle, has been modestly successful, netting 1,300 downloads and about $500 in profit.
Mr. Pérez’s next app was more popular. In May, after about a week of work, he released Stampa, a scrapbooking app that turns photos into digital postage stamps. Stampa has been downloaded 20,000 times and made about $3,000 in profit.
The two apps were part of a surge of additions to Apple’s App Store over the past year and a half, after years of slower growth — thanks in large part to vibecoding.
Vibecoding emerged as a phenomenon last year as A.I. improved at creating software code. Without knowing anything about programming or writing a line of code, people can describe an idea to an A.I. tool, which can build a custom website or app for them.
“I feel like the mobile app space was really hot 10 years ago and kind of got boring,” Mr. Pérez, 27, said. “Now, it’s the hottest thing again because of A.I. and vibecoding and how that technical barrier is not there anymore.”
But as with many things A.I., just because something is easy to build doesn’t mean people will use it. It is not clear if vibecoding is breathing new life into the App Store or just cluttering it.
Last year, the number of new apps released in the App Store grew 30 percent to about 600,000, according to estimates by Sensor Tower, an app analytics firm. In the first half of this year, new apps doubled to about 560,000.
This boom could be a boon for Apple. The company takes a 30 percent cut of in-app purchases like subscriptions, or 15 percent from smaller developers. Theoretically, the more apps in the App Store, the more revenue for Apple.
But Apple can’t take its cut if consumers don’t download and buy things from apps — and downloads from the App Store haven’t taken off. Last year, they grew 3 percent to 35.4 billion, according to Sensor Tower. In the first half of this year, downloads grew 2 percent to 17.6 billion.
Even if they aren’t being downloaded and used, all of the new apps demand resources and labor from Apple. The company manually reviews apps before they are released or updated in the App Store.
In recent months, app makers have complained in Apple’s developer forums of longer review times. In March, for example, the developer of an app said it had been “waiting for review” for about a month with no communication from Apple.
Peter Ajemian, a spokesman for Apple, said that the app had required additional technical review and received approval shortly after it was resubmitted, and that Apple had been engaged with its developer. He said Apple consistently reviewed 90 percent of app submissions within 48 hours.
Mr. Ajemian added that downloads were only one measure of the App Store’s value.
“We’re thrilled to see a new generation of developers embracing the latest tools to build and ship apps faster than ever,” he said in a statement. “All apps are held to the same high standards for quality, privacy and security that users have come to trust.”
When Apple introduced the App Store in 2008, developers flooded it with new apps. Flappy Bird, the 2013 game in which players tried to fly a bird between pipes without hitting them, earned $50,000 per day at the peak of its popularity. The number of new apps released in the App Store peaked in 2016, at about 890,000, according to Sensor Tower.
As the App Store matured, consumers consolidated around a handful of apps. Last year, Apple collected $34.21 billion of the $114.02 billion in revenue from in-app purchases, according to estimates by Appfigures, an app analytics firm.
Growth in the App Store stagnated after 2017. New releases hit a low in 2022, about 420,000, according to Sensor Tower. But since vibecoding became possible, that has changed. Much as they did in the early days of mobile apps, developers are joining the gold rush.
Mr. Pérez is one of those developers. He is planning on quitting his job at JPMorgan Chase next month to develop apps full time.
“I’m talking to these people all the time who are way, way, way ahead of me,” Mr. Pérez said. “It’s crazy how much money they’re making and the opportunities that are there and how fast you can move. Some of these people have failed, have made five apps, and their sixth app blows up.”
This flood is a mixed bag for Apple. The App Store is “not like a typical storefront, where you have shelf space,” said Phillip Shoemaker, who led the App Store from 2009 to 2016. That means that having a lot of new, vibecoded apps — “stuff that somebody might use once” — isn’t necessarily a problem for Apple, he added.
Instead, Mr. Shoemaker said, the risks for the App Store are having “more junk,” or making it easier for “a bad actor” to slip in something problematic, like inappropriate content.
Apple could also see less upside than expected from the surge. Vibecoded apps might not offer in-app purchases, which tend to be more complicated to set up, and contain ads instead, said Eric Seufert, a mobile advertising analyst who runs Mobile Dev Memo, a blog about the app economy.
“Apple doesn’t benefit from that,” Mr. Seufert said.
But not all app developers are hoping to make money for themselves — much less Apple. David Svensson, who works on revenue operations at a construction technology company, started vibecoding in earnest with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude in February, when his workplace started pushing its employees to use A.I.
Mr. Svensson, 44, now pays for a subscription to the tools and makes “small little apps that solve a specific thing,” like tracking fire risk and bans in Sweden, where he lives.
Over the past five months, Mr. Svensson has released 11 apps in the App Store, where they have been downloaded nearly 2,400 times in total. His most popular app, Utkik, tracks aircraft and watercraft. The app has what Mr. Svensson called “a tip jar,” but he said he otherwise didn’t think about making money from vibecoding, or vibecoding for other people.
“I want to keep it as a passion,” Mr. Svensson said. “If something blows up, sure, that would be super, super nice. But that is not the thought behind this.”
