Like a lot of guys of the era, Eli Cohen had a great idea for an app back in 2010. But unlike many of his peers, whose musings were confined to bar hangouts and bad dates, he actually invested about $20,000 of his own money to try to bring the project to life. Unfortunately, his gumption only got him so far. Back then, “building software was painfully hard,” he says. He burned through his budget well before it got off the ground.
What bugs him isn’t that the endeavor failed, it’s that a similar concept — the online education platform Udemy — launched that same year and went on to IPO at a $4 billion valuation in 2021. “I assume they had more resources, better developers, of course, luck,,” Cohen says, emphasizing that he’s not bitter about it. The main lesson he took from the experience is that sometimes the difference between success and failure is not the idea but the ability to execute.
Cohen’s entrepreneurial journey didn’t end there. The 45-year-old, who lives in Israel, is now building a meditation app he’s dubbed MediTailor. He and his brother used AI to create in weeks what would have taken a development team 18 months not long ago. “For the first time in 20 years, the wall between having an idea and actually building it has come down,” he says.
Cohen is verbalizing a sensation familiar to many people in the AI era. Armed with a Mac Mini and a Claude subscription, starry-eyed entrepreneurs can vibe code their way into the App Store with relative ease. Gone are the days of that stereotypical guy who insists he has a killer idea for an app… if only he could bring it to fruition. The former Silicon Valley punchline is now a credible threat: New app releases worldwide so far this year have more than doubled from last year.
The tech industry’s technical moat may have shrunk to a puddle, but just because any guy (or gal) with an idea for the next “Uber for whatever” can make it happen doesn’t mean they’ll create the next internet giant. Execution still matters, and the vast majority of apps still fail. A more saturated market also makes it harder to stand out, and most ideas are not hugely scalable, easily marketable, or particularly unique.
When I point out to Cohen that there are already countless meditation apps, he tells me he’s well aware. “Maybe I will not succeed, but at least I have the tools,” he says.
So does everyone else.
To be sure, it’s not the case that literally anybody can vibe code an app these days — many people don’t have the time, energy, or desire to figure out how to use OpenClaw or Claude Code. “The barrier isn’t zero right now,” says Rebecca Kaden, a managing partner at Union Square Ventures. While vibe coding allows for a new level of “efficient entrepreneurship,” we’re not at true democratization of technology. Vibe coding tools aren’t plug-and-play yet — it’s not a “no brainer” for any random consumer to wake up one morning and start doing it.
The former Silicon Valley punchline is now a credible threat.
For those with the will, however, the way is more accessible than ever. That’s leading to an avalanche of apps: Data from market intelligence firm Appfigures shows that 414,000 new iOS and Android apps were released in the first quarter of 2026, up 115% from the same period in 2025. Also during that same period, three times as many apps were updated compared to the prior year, signaling rapid shipping, experimentation, and churn.
It’s super hard to get attention, though. A mere 118 new apps achieved what Appfigures calls “high-traction” status — meaning more than 50,000 downloads in the US — during the first three months of the year, a measly 0.02% hit rate. It’s also a relatively tiny increase from the 94 apps that did so in 2025.
“The app stores may be entering a higher-noise era: more experiments, more fast launches, and a smaller share that turn into meaningful businesses,” says Ariel Michaeli, the CEO and cofounder of Appfigures.
There’s a famous ’90s episode of “South Park” where the crew meets a group of “underpant gnomes” who develop a questionable three-phase business plan. They have a handy chart that shows three steps to riches: Phase one is to collect underpants. Phase three is profit. And phase two is a giant “?.” The vibe coding environment is leading to a bit of “underpants gnome logic,” explains Charity Majors, an operations and database engineer and the CTO and cofounder of Honeycomb.io. People can collect the underpants — as in code the thing — but there’s a giant question mark before arriving at profits.
Code that’s spun up, more or less for free, still requires modeling and maintenance. Plenty of people could vibe code a Slack clone, but the hard part of building Slack wasn’t writing the code in the first place, Majors says. It was thinking up the design that made it easy to use, intuitive, and scalable to billions of people. “Nobody wants to launch Slack every day and see their buttons move around,” Majors says.
One risk of vibe coding an app without any technical knowledge is that people have no idea how to fix something when it breaks — it creates a cottage industry for software engineers who can address bugs or manage security.
The idea’s not great because you don’t understand how many millions of people need to agree with you.
Building and maintaining are not the only gaps between “genius idea” and “sustainable company.” There’s also — very importantly — marketing and reach. Getting into Google Play or the App Store doesn’t mean anyone will ever see or use your app. Kate Minogue, an AI advisor who works as a fractional chief product officer for consumer tech startups, says distribution remains the hardest problem to solve, and the proliferation of apps makes it worse, not better.
“There’s always an Uber-for or Duolingo-for, and you’re like, ‘OK, well, it exists, or there isn’t actually a market for it,'” Minogue says. “A lot of that time it’s like, ‘Well, the idea’s not great because you don’t understand how many millions of people need to agree with you that this is a great idea for it to make money.'”
A bunch of people sitting around an apartment in a high-income city is not exactly a focus group for what a massive amount of the population wants or needs. Your awesome business idea may not sound so awesome to everyday people — or even to yourself in the cold light of day.
Wannabe entrepreneurs do what they can to optimize their performance in app stores, search engines, and LLM responses in order to try to climb the rankings, or pray they make a viral hit. If that doesn’t work, they’ve got to go to paid marketing and advertising. “When I talk to companies that are building an app, I try to prepare them for having to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to get scaled distribution of their apps,” Minogue says.
Some businesses are navigating this by taking a “studio-based” development approach where they release five, 10 different fitness or productivity apps at once and test in real time whether any of them stick. They don’t necessarily need a banger — they just want one or two to get enough traction to generate some cash. In the meantime, the orphans contribute to the growing mass of apps.
Amjad Masad, the CEO of vibe-coding platform Replit, says it’s a good thing for more “wantrepreneurs” to be able to give their ideas a go — democratization, or however close this is to it, will inevitably mean variations of quality.
Not everyone’s setting out to make a gazillion-dollar product, either. Some people are vibe coding tools and widgets to make it easier to get by at work. Others are making apps that, while not enough to support a full-blown corporation, are enough to support their day-to-day expenses.
“The cool thing about it is that those apps, a lot of them don’t have to be venture-scale, multi-billion-dollar apps,” Masad says. “They can still make a lot of money for the founders, and they can serve a need.”
For some of the Silicon Valley old guard, this is starting to feel like an identity crisis: If a random guy can vibe code a functional product in a weekend, what was the point of fighting over exclusive talent and battling competitors to the death over the past 20 years? Sure, the big players who’ve already made their millions — and billions and trillions — are thrilled about the prospect of cutting costs and speeding up via AI, but what about the people who’ve been slogging to break in?
Kylan Gibbs, the cofounder and CEO of Inworld AI, who previously worked for Google DeepMind, tells me a lot of Silicon Valley natives are starting to “freak out” over recent AI developments. The fear is that either apps are now so easy to build that 100 competitors are about to pop up, or that OpenAI or Anthropic can launch a similar product that will squash their budding firms overnight. Say you’ve been working on an awesome fitness app for five years, grinding to get downloads and perfect the offer. Suddenly, the app store is flooded with options that, to potential users, are indistinguishable — even if they’re actually buggy or clunky. At the same time, there’s a sword hanging above your head: What’s to stop one of the big players from making its own fitness add-on? They’re already slurping up your customers anyway, because who needs a special app for workout advice when they can ask Gemini to create a plan for free?
For some of the Silicon Valley old guard, this is starting to feel like an identity crisis.
“I’ve literally in the last few weeks had a good handful of friends and colleagues who are other founders say, ‘Yeah, I’m just basically giving up,'” Gibbs says. “You think about this group of people who have felt so special for so long, and then to have that ripped away.”
Terrence Johnson, a software engineer in Colorado, is looking at the bright side of the everybody-can-code attitude: It means fewer people bugging him to cook up their projects. He recently dealt with a particularly pushy individual who was trying to enlist him into making some sort of car dealership management system without any concept of what it would entail or how long it would take. He realized the person was getting their ideas from AI in the first place, so Johnson nudged them toward other tools that would let them do some cursory stuff on their own. “It functioned as enough of a distraction that they left me alone,” Johnson says. “Empowering people to try and get their ideas out is good, but they just don’t quite grasp what it all entails.”
New crops of entrepreneurs may be in for a rude awakening on the lessons many startup veterans are familiar with. It’s next to impossible to build a blockbuster. Most endeavors flop. Making money has to, at some point, turn from a future problem into a now problem.
Viaano Spruyt, who lives in Singapore, is excited that vibe coding has allowed him to turn his online community focused on mental health — which formerly lived on Discord — into an app called Huddle. The new app allows them to add more features and functionality, and he and his cofounder have even secured some investor capital. They’re pivoting their concept from mental health to catering to fandoms, but the profit part of the plan remains a question mark, and they’re relying on word of mouth for distribution. “What’s becoming harder is getting people to care,” he says.
Spruyt and his cofounder are learning what a lot of vibe-preneurs are beginning to realize: Business basics are extra important, and excellence in sales, marketing, and logistics is a way to get ahead — or at least manage to claw your way out of the crowded trenches.
Relatively speaking, there are worse problems than having 900 too many productivity apps in the App Store and forcing the Silicon Valley elite to try harder. A builder economy is a fun one to be in. And hey, if it shuts up the killer app idea guy who’s talking your ear off over at a bar holding an IPA, it’s a win for everybody.
Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.
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