gardaaniApp Store sees 84% surge in new apps as AI coding tools take off
https://9to5mac.com/2026/04/06/app-store-sees-84-surge-in-new-apps-as-ai-coding-tools-take-off/
I've been watching the /r/cli and /r/tui subreddits for some time. The amount of vibe coded apps posted there just continues to climb. Some people in the comments for these apps can be quite rude when they read the description and find out its vibe coded. Nevermind how vile some can be when it's not in the announcement but the author lets them know down the line in the comments.
To me this is fair. If you vibe code something and try to pass it off as your own work people will be angry about the deception.
I don't love seeing slop everywhere and I don't feel good about models being trained on people's hard work, but... I also have a hard time believing my work was ever much different. I've always regurgitated and synthesized existing solutions. I took them from open source examples. I read people's blogs. I'm basically a really slow LLM most of the time. Is that a form of deception too? I really wonder how much of a difference it is sometimes. Maybe LLMs are just a shortcut of sorts to get where we've previously gotten using very similar means. Just absorbing and recycling ideas, learning by reinforcement, so on.
Are any of them good?
In my experience no, but I don't think that's a problem.
It's fascinating to see so many ideas and so much enthusiasm. I sometimes wonder if the fervor will die down as people realize it's still really hard to make truly fantastic software, but it's hard to say. There's a ton of inertia behind the vibe coding rush.
I also wonder if vibe coding is actually somewhat incompatible with the states of mind and contemplation that's often required to figure out how to solve problems properly. It isn't clear if you can brute force great solutions without putting in the initial domain distillation and idea incubation and so on. I'm sure there are exceptions but I have a feeling it'll never be trivial to come up with truly good and novel ideas for software, and vibing to get there might not make it any easier.
Finally! The tsunami of incredibly useful, "AI" coded apps we've been waiting for. This is really good news.
Anybody categorized these apps? I mean, there were literally hundreds of flashlight apps in the Google android store at one point. Are "AI" apps doing variants of one thing, or are they all over the map?
30% is a surprising metric because just anecdotally my team's PR submissions have jumped by about the same ratio in the same time frame. (No, I'm not measuring it - I just own a downstream piece and have casually observed its higher rate of use).