I’m an indie developer in one of the categories mentioned as being AI heavy (Photo & Video).
I’ve been shipping apps since way before vibe coding (https://heliographe.studio), and it’s been a pretty speedy transition in terms of how the market has shifted in the last 12 months.
Making a high quality camera/photo app used to require a lot of fairly advanced skills: UI design & engineering for the core app, an understanding of signal processing/color transforms/etc for producing the final image, graphics programming to keep everything rendering smooth in the preview (especially if you have advanced features like focus peaking, scopes/histograms, etc)…
It used to be that if you shipped a polished camera app, you would get at least a bit of attention just on those merits.
But in the last year it has become utterly trivial for anyone to make a camera app, and every week there are dozens of new entrants on the market (most of them claim to do their own unique non-AI, film-like processing).
But of those, which has gotten the most attention? I’d argue it’s the just released Chromagraph, designed in part by Rian Johnson of Star Wars fame.
If you compare it to every other camera app released recently, I’d argue it’s pretty average in terms of features/output quality. But that name recognition is what drives downloads more than ever.
I bet it's pretty close to a Pareto distribution with 20% of the apps making 80% of the total App store revenue. You can guess which apps those are from Apple's top/editor's choice charts.
Do you even need the top chart when you open the app and every other day it's either a Scopely property or Monopoly Go?
It's wild to know that Freecash is somehow back in the App Store after [1] earlier this year and they're actively running aggressive marketing campaigns on TV again.
Not public, but services like sensor tower make a decent guess based on (I assume) a small set of people who are willing to install what's effectively spyware for $$$.
Its probably just me, but I had to scroll all the way to the bottom, mentioning something about Macs, to verify that this was only about the Apple app store.
I think the app store will be in trouble in the future.
I think most non-gaming apps will be replaced by a single AI app that is like a super assistant to you. No need to book on Booking.com app if you can just have your assistant look for what you actually want.
Likewise, I think Google Search is in similar amount of trouble, if not more and faster. Why do you need to search on your own if AI can search 20-30 websites in seconds and find what you're looking for?
Same for things like Microsoft's cash cow Office suites. In fact, Claude already has docs built in.
This is why I think big tech went all in on AI. All their cash cows are under huge threat by AI-first products.
Am I one of very few people that believes LLM apps don't solve or replace a large number of apps.
Take all these basic lifestyle CRUD apps. Maybe it's a skill issue on my part, but whenever I've tried to use LLM apps over any sort of medium-to-long-term time scale for tracking something (ie. endurance running training), within about a month it begins hallucinating, recalling the wrong things, linking the wrong bits of data to other bits of data (dates, distances, heart rate data, workout paces etc), and it does all of this even when pointed to a basic spreadsheet or simple text file to keep it onboard with what happened where. It just seems to look at these files, and then look at it's own context and confuse all the details based on its own context.
Every other month, some brand new shiny model is released and it's exactly the same deal every time. I think the underlying technology simply can't deal with these sorts of goals. A whole range of apps for lifestyle tracking don't seem under threat, in my opinion, if this is the best its capable of.
Many other things I can't imagine wanting an AI to do for me, especially anything involving payments, bookings. There was a discussion the other day on here about AI being used to order takeout. Why would somebody want to delegate one of their last personal decisions to a LLM?
What you're saying is true now, but given the existence of grok-bot and similar dots (et al.) there is now an amassing amount of training data for "personal assistants" -- so in a couple of generations time, you'll find frontier models will be extremely capable in these areas.
Harnesses have been developed for this, and its also fairly trivial to do large scale verifiable-rewards post-training for "personal assistant" style things. eg., invent a booking website, invent a PA GUI-aware harness, and reward the model when a successful booking takes place. Do that 1bn times.
I am in the pro food-order delivery department. I just want to tell my phone, "Hey Siri I want to order at Restaurant X, we are two people, no desert - make suggestion" and it shows me the order on the display with total price, arrival time and the selected food items. If I want, I can command changes - or simply say "Yes thats good, confirm the order" and be done. This is especially useful as I mostly order the same things across 2-3 restaurants, that is most of the time the suggestion is probably right.
A good alternative for your example is to make it create a stateful artefact (Claude) / whatever OpenAI calls ChatGPT.
And there, it has a database of sorts, running god knows where on god knows what, and you have a single-user web app that you may or may not ever open and see (since your favorite AI agent can just read and update it for you anyway).
Today it’s still something the user has to suggest / request.
Tomorrow? If they put a bit of effort these models will reach for building these one-off ephemeral or long-lived hyper-custom apps the same way they now reach for a python sandbox for basic arithmetics and statistics.
Looking for a flat? Scheduled task + CRM like artefact for it to monitor, maintain, and update.
Looking for holidays? Your own personal shareable moodboard with destinations and what not.
Have a use case or task for which chat or editing text docs is a frustrating way of correcting or giving feedback? Have it build a dedicated, custom artefact just for that.
When you encounter a use case where LLMs limits show, make them build tools.
Assistant booking a place for me is last thing I'd want, I want to see ratings, photos, overall look&feel of the place, not spin the wheel and get some random place booked
I think the single AI app will be thoroughly enshittified. You ask for a hotel and the assistant operator is normally getting 20% of your payment as a kickback, so it shows you the highest price it thinks you'll pay, but 40% if it's a certain chain so it only shows that chain. Everything will be like this.
I’ve been shipping apps since way before vibe coding (https://heliographe.studio), and it’s been a pretty speedy transition in terms of how the market has shifted in the last 12 months.
Making a high quality camera/photo app used to require a lot of fairly advanced skills: UI design & engineering for the core app, an understanding of signal processing/color transforms/etc for producing the final image, graphics programming to keep everything rendering smooth in the preview (especially if you have advanced features like focus peaking, scopes/histograms, etc)…
It used to be that if you shipped a polished camera app, you would get at least a bit of attention just on those merits.
But in the last year it has become utterly trivial for anyone to make a camera app, and every week there are dozens of new entrants on the market (most of them claim to do their own unique non-AI, film-like processing).
But of those, which has gotten the most attention? I’d argue it’s the just released Chromagraph, designed in part by Rian Johnson of Star Wars fame.
https://www.theverge.com/tech/1025659/rian-johnson-chromagra...
If you compare it to every other camera app released recently, I’d argue it’s pretty average in terms of features/output quality. But that name recognition is what drives downloads more than ever.
Could bé another similar report about Google's App Store?
Thanks again!
It's wild to know that Freecash is somehow back in the App Store after [1] earlier this year and they're actively running aggressive marketing campaigns on TV again.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/14/how-the-rewards-app-freeca...
I think most non-gaming apps will be replaced by a single AI app that is like a super assistant to you. No need to book on Booking.com app if you can just have your assistant look for what you actually want.
Likewise, I think Google Search is in similar amount of trouble, if not more and faster. Why do you need to search on your own if AI can search 20-30 websites in seconds and find what you're looking for?
Same for things like Microsoft's cash cow Office suites. In fact, Claude already has docs built in.
This is why I think big tech went all in on AI. All their cash cows are under huge threat by AI-first products.
Take all these basic lifestyle CRUD apps. Maybe it's a skill issue on my part, but whenever I've tried to use LLM apps over any sort of medium-to-long-term time scale for tracking something (ie. endurance running training), within about a month it begins hallucinating, recalling the wrong things, linking the wrong bits of data to other bits of data (dates, distances, heart rate data, workout paces etc), and it does all of this even when pointed to a basic spreadsheet or simple text file to keep it onboard with what happened where. It just seems to look at these files, and then look at it's own context and confuse all the details based on its own context.
Every other month, some brand new shiny model is released and it's exactly the same deal every time. I think the underlying technology simply can't deal with these sorts of goals. A whole range of apps for lifestyle tracking don't seem under threat, in my opinion, if this is the best its capable of.
Many other things I can't imagine wanting an AI to do for me, especially anything involving payments, bookings. There was a discussion the other day on here about AI being used to order takeout. Why would somebody want to delegate one of their last personal decisions to a LLM?
However, about 1 year ago, AI coding agents were laughed. Now the vast majority of code is written by them.
Intelligence getting exponentially cheaper per token. At some point, there will be an inflection point where "it just works".
Harnesses have been developed for this, and its also fairly trivial to do large scale verifiable-rewards post-training for "personal assistant" style things. eg., invent a booking website, invent a PA GUI-aware harness, and reward the model when a successful booking takes place. Do that 1bn times.
And there, it has a database of sorts, running god knows where on god knows what, and you have a single-user web app that you may or may not ever open and see (since your favorite AI agent can just read and update it for you anyway).
Today it’s still something the user has to suggest / request.
Tomorrow? If they put a bit of effort these models will reach for building these one-off ephemeral or long-lived hyper-custom apps the same way they now reach for a python sandbox for basic arithmetics and statistics.
Looking for a flat? Scheduled task + CRM like artefact for it to monitor, maintain, and update.
Looking for holidays? Your own personal shareable moodboard with destinations and what not.
Have a use case or task for which chat or editing text docs is a frustrating way of correcting or giving feedback? Have it build a dedicated, custom artefact just for that.
When you encounter a use case where LLMs limits show, make them build tools.
There never was any need for these apps. A website works perfectly fine for simple use cases like that.
Browsing through hotels is one of the best parts of the entire experience.
I prefer the part where you wait in airport or on train station over it.
People think it's some kind of genius move or very Apple-like move to not join the AI race.
But who is actually going to build apps on the fly better, faster for you? Siri or Opus 9? Siri or GPT 10 Astra?
When many tasks are done better on a single AI app, the iPhone moat will be greatly diminished which will open up competitors to iOS and Android.
I paste a screenshot and ChatGPT automatically knows to extract the text for me. Needed an expensive/inconsistent app before.