You’ve felt it, haven’t you? That quiet thrill when you first prompted an AI to build something — a little tool, a silly game, a half-baked idea that suddenly had a pulse. For the first time in history, the distance between “I have an idea” and “I shipped a product” collapsed to roughly the length of a coffee break.
And now the App Store is drowning.
Apple’s marketplace is being flooded with AI-generated apps — what developers call “vibecoded” software. You describe what you want. The AI writes the code. You upload it. Done. No compiler errors at 2 AM. No Stack Overflow rabbit holes. No years of learning Swift. Just vibes, shipped.
When everyone can build, the building stops being the point. The bottleneck moves — and it moves to the one place AI can’t help: making anyone care.
Here’s what nobody in the vibecoding hype cycle wants to admit: the technical barrier was never the real barrier. It was just the most visible one. The actual wall — the one that has always separated a useful app from digital dust — is attention. Trust. The simple fact that a human being, with a finite life and an overflowing home screen, decides your thing is worth ten seconds of their day.
AI didn’t tear down that wall. It made it taller.
Think about what happens when creation costs approach zero. Photography got democratized — and Instagram didn’t become a museum. It became a feed. Most photos are forgotten in a scroll. Writing got democratized — and the internet didn’t become a library. It became an ocean of content nobody reads. Now app-making is getting the same treatment, and we’re about to learn the same lesson at a new scale.
The App Store isn’t becoming a marketplace anymore. It’s becoming a social feed — a stream of personal expressions masquerading as products, where 99.9% will never find an audience.
And that’s not entirely bad. There’s something genuinely beautiful about a teenager in Manila building an app for her little brother’s math homework. Or a retiree in Ohio vibecoding a bird-watching tracker nobody else will ever use. These apps don’t need users. They’re not products. They’re personal artifacts — the digital equivalent of a handwritten letter or a backyard treehouse.
The top comment on the original story said it perfectly: “Make apps for self, not others.” That’s not cynicism. That might be the healthiest framing of this entire shift.
But if you’re building apps for people — if you’re trying to solve a real problem for real users — the game just changed underneath you. Your coding ability, your framework fluency, your architecture diagrams? Commoditized. Overnight. The person who deeply understands why someone struggles with their finances, or what makes a meditation app actually calming, or how a small business owner thinks about inventory — that person now has a decisive edge. Not because they can build better. Because they can see better.
The scarce resource was never code. It was always empathy. We just confused the two because coders got paid more.
So yes, the App Store is flooding. Yes, most of what’s washing in is junk — AI-generated shells with no soul, no purpose, no reason to exist beyond someone testing whether the prompt worked. That flood will get worse before it gets better. Apple’s review process, already strained, will either become an AI-vs-AI arms race or collapse under the volume.
But here’s the twist: the flood might actually be clarifying. When anyone can make an app, the only apps that break through will be the ones that feel made by someone who gives a damn. Not coded by someone skilled — made by someone who understood a human need so precisely that the app feels inevitable.
In a world of infinite supply, the only thing that’s scarce is someone who actually gives a shit about your problem.
The vibecoders will keep shipping. The App Store will keep flooding. And the rest of us will keep scrolling past 10,000 apps to find the one that actually makes our life better — built by someone who didn’t just have the tools, but had the ears to listen first.
FAQ
Q: Isn't more apps just more competition, which is healthy?
A: No. Competition implies a filter — quality rising to the top. What we're seeing is noise drowning signal. When creation cost is zero, there's no natural selection pressure. The App Store's discovery mechanisms weren't built for infinite supply, and Apple hasn't adapted them.
Q: If I'm a non-technical founder, should I be excited about vibecoding?
A: Yes, but reframe your advantage. Your edge was never that you couldn't code — it's that you understand a problem domain. AI just removed your excuse for not shipping. Now the only question that matters is: do you actually understand the human you're building for?
Q: Won't AI also solve the discoverability problem with better recommendations?
A: Possibly — but that just shifts the bottleneck from creation to distribution, which is worse. It means a few algorithmic gatekeepers decide what billions of vibecoded apps reach users. You're not democratizing the market; you're concentrating it harder.