The Beginning of the End for the App Store?
The App Store model suddenly feels a lot less stable than it used to. For years, Apple and Google have completely defined how software gets into people’s hands. If you wanted something done, you searched, downloaded and installed. That was just the way it worked.
What’s changing now is not the platforms themselves, but what users are capable of doing. AI-assisted “vibe coding” (I hate that phrase) has moved things to a point where building software is no longer reserved for developers. You can describe what you want and get something functional back. It’s not perfect yet, but it’s already useful, and it’s improving quickly.
That shift lands very differently depending on the type of app. The big, network-driven platforms are fine. Apps like Instagram or Facebook exist because people use them together. Their value comes from shared presence, identity, and scale. That doesn’t translate into something you spin up for yourself.
Where things start to wobble is everywhere else. The majority of apps on the App Store are small utilities solving specific problems. A tracker, a planner, a niche tool that does one thing reasonably well. Those are exactly the kinds of things that are now within reach for users to create themselves.
That changes the shape of the market in a pretty fundamental way. Instead of one app serving thousands or millions of people, you start to get lots of small, highly specific tools serving one person or a small group. The more specific the need, the stronger that shift becomes.
Of course, behaviour doesn’t change overnight. Most people won’t suddenly start building their own tools every day. Convenience still matters, and if something already exists that does the job well, people will use it. There’s always a threshold where thinking and describing become more effort than just downloading.
There’s also a layer of complexity that still acts as a barrier. Some apps are simple wrappers around functionality. Others are built on years of domain knowledge, edge cases, and careful design decisions. A professional-grade photography app, for example, is more than a list of features.
Knowing what to build is half the problem.
Trust plays into this as well. App stores still provide a sense of reliability. Users feel like something has at least passed through a basic filter before it reaches them. That kind of confidence takes time to rebuild in a world where software is generated on demand.
Even with those constraints, something important is shifting. Users no longer have to rely entirely on what’s available. If nothing quite fits, there is now a realistic alternative. That option alone starts to change expectations.
The long tail of apps becomes the most exposed. If your product exists purely to solve a narrow problem and your main advantage is convenience, you are now competing with a world where convenience includes creating something custom.
That doesn’t mean the App Store disappears, but it does mean its role becomes more focused. It remains the place for software that benefits from scale, shared usage, and a level of trust and standardisation. The kinds of products that are difficult to replicate on an individual level.
At the same time, a growing number of tools will never appear there at all. They will be created for a specific need, used for a period of time, and then replaced or discarded. Personal, temporary, and largely invisible.
We’ve seen this kind of shift before. When building websites became easier, it didn’t reduce the importance of the internet. It expanded who could participate. It also changed what people expected to be able to do themselves.
The same thing is starting to happen with software. It’s not dramatic, and it won’t happen all at once, but it does change the underlying assumptions.
The App Store still has a place in that world. It just doesn’t sit at the centre of everything in quite the same way anymore.
