'Vibecoded' apps flood Apple's App Store and wear out users' patience

Apple's App Store is experiencing its biggest wave of app submissions in years, but this time the driving force is not professional development studios but 'vibecoding': the practice of building apps using artificial intelligence tools without needing to know how to program. According to estimates from the analytics firm Sensor Tower, cited by The New York Times, developers submitted nearly 600,000 new apps last year, 30% more than the year before. And that figure has already doubled in the first half of this year, with around 560,000 new apps submitted in just six months.

This is not the first time Apple's store has undergone a boom of this kind. Submissions of new apps peaked at about 890,000 in 2016 and then fell steadily until bottoming out at around 420,000 in 2022. What is striking about the current wave is that it reverses that trend abruptly, but with a very different creator profile: while the previous boom was led by professional developers, this one is driven by people with no programming background who lean on AI assistants to build software from scratch.

The article recounts the case of a Chicago engineer, with no prior experience in app development, who used AI tools to launch two applications. The first took him seven weeks between building it and preparing it for the store, and it achieved 1,300 downloads. He completed the second in barely a week and it got 20,000 downloads. Motivated by these results, the engineer plans to quit his current job to devote himself full-time to creating apps.

However, the rise in submissions does not translate into a proportional increase in usage or revenue for Apple. Sensor Tower calculates that App Store downloads grew only 3% last year and 2% so far this year, well below the pace of new apps arriving in the store. Since Apple charges a commission on developers' sales, that widening gap between submissions and downloads means the flood of apps is not generating an equivalent profit for the company. An Apple spokesperson, consulted by the Times, played down downloads as a single metric, arguing that they are just one of the ways to measure the App Store's overall value.

This deluge also appears to be straining Apple's own review process, which examines every app before publishing it. According to reports on Apple's developer forums, some have had to wait weeks to obtain approval, with little communication from the company. Apple, however, disputes that perception and assures the Times that it resolves 90% of submissions in under 48 hours.

Beyond review times, the underlying problem is the quality of what actually gets published. Phillip Shoemaker, who ran the App Store between 2009 and 2016, told the Times that a flood of low-effort apps is not necessarily a problem for a digital store with no 'shelf space' constraints. For him, the real risk is that it becomes easier for malicious actors to slip harmful apps past the review filters.

That reading, however, does not fully capture the wear and tear felt by users themselves, visible above all on forums like Reddit. There, any post about a new app tends to receive, almost automatically, the question "is this vibecoded?", never phrased as a compliment. The pattern the article describes is recurring: many of these apps are low-effort copies of already existing apps, with barely a coat of polish or a slightly different design; others are outright broken or a security risk, built by people without enough technical experience to detect and fix their own flaws; and some, although they work, give the impression of having no real reason to exist.

That fatigue is already reflected in concrete community moderation decisions. The moderators of the r/iosapps subreddit implemented a tiered system that relegates to a separate megathread —outside the main feed— any app without a demonstrated track record, whether in the form of App Store reviews, a GitHub repository or a recognized developer badge. Apps built mostly with AI-generated code must be labeled "Vibe Coded," a requirement the community treats as even more of a priority than clarifying whether the app is free or paid.

The result is that the submission and download figures do not really reflect how many of those apps are worthwhile. Faced with so much noise, users themselves have begun compiling lists of typical signs of a vibecoded app, dismissing them at a glance without checking whether it is one of the exceptions that do work well. It is an understandable reaction given the volume of mediocre apps, but it also means some genuinely useful apps end up buried under the widespread suspicion that the rest of the phenomenon has generated.