6 ms·

Ask HN: What Is the State of App Development in 2026?

• mrKola 5mo ago
  It is bad. Layoffs everywhere. Google is becoming apple. Companies want you to do the job of 6 engineers using ai. The market is saturated for new apps.
  • MattDamonSpace 5mo ago
    I’ll be curious to see how many new vibe coded apps make it to a 2.0
• drrob 5mo ago
  I'm have a game on both app stores, built in .net Maui. It earns enough to keep a roof over my head. AI is useless when developing with Maui, as it's too new of a development framework for any AI's knowledgebase to have a clue what to do with it.
  • mattmanser 5mo ago
    https://github.com/dotnet/maui/wiki/Using-AI-to-Work-on-.NET-MAUI https://github.com/dotnet/maui/wiki/Using-AI-to-Work-on-.NET...
    • drrob 5mo ago
      Indeed, I have tried this route, but for anything more than a really simple app it's just not effective enough.
• robgough 5mo ago
  I had a go at building both a Mac and iOS dictation app the other day (dictator.robgough.net) thinking that with Claude's input, this probably wouldn't work... but it was a real problem I had, and I wanted to see how far we could get. Best way to learn the tools, right? I'd already spent the day playing with alternative apps that didn't quite do what I wanted. The app itself is fairly straightforward, but it included some intermediate complexity in terms of audio capture and calling local models. Both something I'd never done, and as not-a-mac dev something I probably wouldn't have attempted for a side-project while I'm meant to be bootstrapping my own thing. I didn't touch a line of code, and I was blown away. I'm so impressed in fact that I'm predicting we'll see a resurgence in native apps in the near future. By far the worst (and slowest) part of the process is having to deal with the App Store, and the ridiculous hoops you have to jump through to get past review.
  • yacin 5mo ago
    could you talk more about the hoops? i’m getting close to the point i’d like to release something and it’d be my first time.
    • peterlk 5mo ago
      You need to have an Apple developer account. Then you need to submit your app to Apple for review. Then you need to comply with a list of sometimes arbitrary corrections/requirements that they send back (there is a document that specifies what you need to do, but it is not uniformly enforced in my experience). Then, eventually, you can list your app on the app store. It’s not super onerous, but it is much more annoying than the theoretical alternative of allowing people to install software of their choosing on their hardware (i.e. download the binary and run it)
      • robgough 5mo ago
        Exactly this. For example the iOS app failed first time as I accidentally used "Free" in the app name, and the app declared support for UIBackgroundModes but they were "unable to locate any features that require persistent audio". The dictation keyboard switched you to the app, then if you left would keep recording... fairly basic and obvious stuff. I could have either gone back and argued the case, or simply rip it out which I opted for. It's now failed again because: The keyboard extension does not provide any functionality when the "Full Access" setting is toggled off. Well no, hardly my fault you've locked down the usefulness of third-party keyboards, but now I've added a full keyboard in there so it's a bit more useful without that access. I don't expect any users to ever see this. Admittedly this was more frustrating when that would be a couple days work, not just a quick prompt, to fix. Good luck with your app. Don't worry too much, you can generally work through their issues... but it can be a slow process. Make sure you leave plenty of time between your submission and when you want to launch!
        • yacin 5mo ago
          great, thanks for the details! really helpful :)
• lambdapanic 5mo ago
  [flagged]
• babaganoosh89 5mo ago
  It's incredibly easy to make apps nowadays, it's all about distribution (usually on social media).
• coffeefirst 5mo ago
  I’ve been thinking about this—if I wanted to learn iOS dev where should I start? (Book preferred.) Mostly for fun/scratch my own itch, and using AI as a companion/helper device.
• afavour 5mo ago
  I suspect AI is going to result in the bottom falling out of the market for simple apps. React made simple webapps a case of just gluing dependencies together and much more approachable to a generalist developer than the previous generation of web development was. But native apps weren’t affected in the same way. With AI I suspect we’ll see a lot of simple apps, the ones that really aren’t doing much other than CRUD operations on a remote API, become very heavily AI generated by generalist developers. But there will still remain a healthy market for working on considerably more complex apps.
  • tetris11 5mo ago
    Will the complex apps be discoverable though, and if not, will the devs bother at all? I feel like this would be a win for old-school open source, where people would do it for the love of the aim, and better vetted app stores like F-Droid might win out
    • hermitcrab 5mo ago
      >Will the complex apps be discoverable though That is the real issue. How to get noticed in a sea of slop.
      • conductr 5mo ago
        Complexity doesn’t matter. Nobody jumps on the App Store and thinks, “I’m going to install something complex today.” Presumably complex problems are lacking solutions and if that requires a complexity to solve, people will discover it. Not because it’s complex, because prior solutions were lacking.
    • afavour 5mo ago
      Is that a new problem though? I thought the App Store had been dead for discovery for a long time.
    • nulledy 5mo ago
      Surprisingly I'm seeing a rapid increase of discoverability for my apps FROM LLMs. The flood of Claude/ChatGPT users finding my apps right after I get a basic site up, before I've told anyone it exists, is astonishing. If you are solving a problem users are searching for, you will be found and found faster than ever via LLMs.
• _jss 5mo ago
  I am building an app that is for a niche market, and I wouldn't have started without LLMs. The hard part of this app is great design, requiring intentionally designed workflows and lots of real world testing. The code isn't the interesting part and now code isn't taking most of my time. It's great! Once the design is nailed down and workflows tightened up, I don't expect much active development and can focus on distribution and marketing. As a solo dev, this feels totally doable but ask me in 6 months.
• CharlesW 5mo ago
  My perspective: I've been supporting and working with Mac and iOS developers since the last century, when Apple moved me from Chicago to be an evangelist at Apple HQ in Cupertino. I know as much as anyone about AI-assisted app development, as the creator/maintainer of the free/open source Axiom (https://charleswiltgen.github.io/Axiom/ https://charleswiltgen.github.io/Axiom/) for iOS/macOS devs. It's not as dire as you might think. To software developers, the "AI revolution" is largely what the "desktop publishing revolution" was to designers. Yes, it meant the "riff raff" could theoretically play with the pros. Some percentage of the riff raff became pros. Most of the pros eventually adopted the tools and techniques used by the riff raff. Some of the pros didn't survive the transition and happily retired, taking their rubylith, Letraset type, and rubber cement with them. The silver lining is that most of a software engineer's job isn't coding, it's thinking. LLMs can't do that, and we're not getting to AGI with current AI architectures. LLMs can amplify thinking, and an LLM in the hands of a software engineer or architect is at least two orders of magnitude more effective than it can be in the hands of a vibe coder. As LLMs get better for vibe coders, they also get better for pros. One can argue that, by the end of the decade, hand-coded [your language of choice] may be considered as unnecessary as hand-coded assembly has been for decades. But coding in modern languages is already 7-8 levels of abstraction above the metal. One more level of abstraction is not the death of software engineering, IMO.
  • sidrag22 5mo ago
    I don't think i fear so much for competing on quality vs a vibe coder, I think two orders of magnitude is underselling the potential snowball effect of a vibe coder attempting to craft up a semi complex project. The sooner they start to pile on complexity, the quicker it is that the 2x gap widens. The fear for me comes with that initial creation, which is a fear i have across a large amount of things for AI "disruption". Just floods of bad products at rates that are insane, same type of problem that exists on github of just garbage prs, and same thing for any reddit/twitter/even hn type comment thread.
    • WillAdams 5mo ago
      Just another layer of Sturgeon's Law? - 90% of everything is vibe-coded crap - 90% of what isn't vibe-coded crap is also crap ergo, the small percentage which is left is not crap.
• fullstick 5mo ago
  I don't install apps unless it's for an event or something. I just make my own to fit my needs. I can get a functional pwa out in about a day or two now.
  • paldepind2 5mo ago
    What do you use for hosting the PWAs?
    • faangguyindia 5mo ago
      Cloudflare pages.
• pedalpete 5mo ago
  So a bit different from the other comments. We're a wearable company which of course pairs with an app. We built iOS first because that's what most of our users have, though the team is mostly on Android. We built our logic in Rust, so that compiles cross platform. It's really just the UI layer that is per platform. Though I had initially written our first demo in React-Native, the team wanted to go with native UI. Lately we've been talking about moving the timeline for our Android app up because we can get AI to help using the iOS app as a foundation. I haven't seen anything really new and compelling in iOS/Android land. The promise of right once run anywhere continues to be a promise, and the bluetooth libraries across different devices (particularly in Android land) has me concerned.
  • tasuki 5mo ago
    > We built our logic in Rust, so that compiles cross platform. It's really just the UI layer that is per platform. Having never created a mobile app, how's that work exactly?
    • noman-land 5mo ago
      Check out tauri.
      • Klonoar 5mo ago
        Tauri is not even remotely an appropriate answer to this question.
    • satvikpendem 5mo ago
      FFI. For example in Flutter, there are packages like flutter_rust_bridge that allow you to write Rust that then interacts with the host OS.
    • david_allison 5mo ago
      We define our API into the Rust via protobufs[0] and some codegen. The wrapper around these is very lean, FFI-based[1], it's abstracted to a library so Android devs never need to know there's rust/codegen involved. We then define a light Kotlin-based wrapper around the protobuf-generated API[2]. This is a candidate to move to Kotlin multiplatform in the near future (mostly for test speed improvements). [0] https://github.com/ankitects/anki/tree/main/proto https://github.com/ankitects/anki/tree/main/proto [1] https://github.com/ankidroid/Anki-Android-Backend/blob/a0428512b37bf07e5bf691bae53c168df37739ad/rsdroid/src/main/java/net/ankiweb/rsdroid/NativeMethods.kt#L5-L18 https://github.com/ankidroid/Anki-Android-Backend/blob/a0428... [2] https://github.com/ankidroid/Anki-Android/blob/68192585a7ae45e6fa8cccbc427cf6603966b48b/libanki/src/main/java/com/ichi2/anki/libanki/Decks.kt#L396-L404 https://github.com/ankidroid/Anki-Android/blob/68192585a7ae4...
• ardit33 5mo ago
  AI Coding is great helper but not a substitutue for producing decent looking apps. Anytime I let lose AI (Both Codex and Claude), they end up producing slop that is overcomplicated, and that looks like a generic tutorial interface. Great for toy apps but not for serious one. When I do most of the architecture, and use AI to 'fill in the blanks' or just finish some functionality here and there, then AI is great. The main reason is that it is trained by public code that is mostly tutorials, and simple apps, so AI can't build a great looking one by itself (or it doesn't how to do large apps). But for specific features, it is great. TLDR: It is still a 'fill in the funcionality here' type of help. Folks that are successful with letting 'multiple agents' running in the background are mostly for backend work where the results are easier to verify. Also, there is a lot of LARPING in twitter sphere exaggerating what AI can realistically do right now. But I can see how it can affect entry level jobs. AI is still like an CS intern, or very very junior engineer.
• mamsouuu 5mo ago
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• rupatiwari25 5mo ago
  AI has made it much easier to build an app, but distribution hasn't gotten any easier. Getting through App Store review, acquiring users, and retaining them still feels like 90% of the battle.
  • frictasolver 5mo ago
    [flagged]
• guessbest 5mo ago
  I just do iOS development and my opinion is this: Start with XCode then use an LLM to design and develop it out from there its great. The newer models work great with project files where they used to struggle. Using the Visual Code development tools alongside XCode, claude skills and 3rd party libraries and frameworks with SwiftUI and Swift 5/6 is really convincing me I should make apps full time again. Coding apps has become my dream job. https://github.com/LeoMobileDeveloper/ios-developer-tools https://github.com/LeoMobileDeveloper/ios-developer-tools https://github.com/AvdLee/SwiftUI-Agent-Skill https://github.com/AvdLee/SwiftUI-Agent-Skill
• bpavuk 5mo ago
  Android native dev here. > What is going on in the world of pure IOS/Android app development? I'll speak only for Android. I am tired of Google breaking source compatibility with every AndroidX release and remaining on outdated IntelliJ Platform versions in Android Studio. not too long ago, Google released AGP 9.0, which was a SHOCKWAVE for many Android projects. many compiler plugins' compatibility, including Google's own Protobuf Gradle plugin, took very long to adapt. also, Kotlin Multiplatform received so much damage that a month after release, JetBrains themselves released an AGP 9.0 migration video on YouTube. and then we have MDC-Android (Views) v. Compose tension. MDC-Android got Material 3 and M3 Expressive components much faster than Compose, and for many you still have to be on alpha Compose Material3 releases... which are more stable than "Stable," somehow. Compose is nice, but I'd swap Material for something else ASAP or use Compose Foundation directly. > How is AI/LLMs affecting app development? you have more useless buttons in Android Studio. or, if you are a paying IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate user, you can have Android support in IDEA, which enables ACP agents without sacrificing proper Android support. IDEA Android plugin lags behind AGP upgrades a little, though, but it's fine. oh, and, you can vibecode Android apps in Google AI Studio with streaming from a Google-hosted device, all without Android Studio. > what has changed in App Development in the past 2-5 years? 2 years? a lot. 5 years? the world turned upside down! Compose got Stable release 4 years ago. > What does a career in only app development look like nowadays? very discouraging. everyone just prefers React "Native". I couldn't find an Android job in two years because it's nowhere to apply to in Ukraine and just recently switched to .NET. guess what? less than a few weeks passed after I updated my Djinni and now I have a few interviews on the next week.
• Larrikin 5mo ago
  LLMs so far have just been another tool to use. As an Android developer, KMP is the bigger development. It seems mature enough now that if I want to build an app as a single dev I feel confident that I could get the iOS version out at the same time. They seem to be avoiding the mistakes of Xamarin and Flutter
  • satvikpendem 5mo ago
    What are the mistakes in your mind? And isn't Compose Multiplatform basically Flutter?
• georgemcbay 5mo ago
  For the past 12 years I've been mostly developing for Android professionally (minus a brief 1 year stint writing code for a system based on Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3). Other than LLMs the biggest change has been moving to Kotlin Compose from the old Android XML-based layout system. LLMs are something I use often now and I'm not thrilled about this but it is what it is. I'm one of those people who prefer to hand craft code in a deep flow state so the move to LLMs has made me enjoy my job less, but it is hard to argue against the productivity gains so I try to be grateful that there was a long period where what I enjoyed doing and getting paid for were so well aligned. It isn't like my job is horrible now, it is just not quite as fun. While I use agentic AI quite a bit, I don't "vibe code". Much of the software I currently write falls under various medical compliance systems (FDA, EMA, etc) and they rightfully expect us to understand and be personally responsible for the quality of the code we produce. Even absent the regulations, I still find it absolutely wild people ship code (associated with their name in any way) without looking at it. I've been working for the same company for the past 5 years so I have little idea of how the career/interview side of things have changed recently. From anecdotal reports it seems like a giant mess of ghost jobs and competing with massive piles of AI-generated and AI-filtered resumes these days unless you have a strong network from the before times. A lot of people in this thread seem to be worried about discoverability, I'm sure AI has made that worse but it was already a huge problem to get random apps noticed even before AI. The apps I currently work on professionally support external hardware devices that the apps control via bluetooth, so app store discoverability isn't a big concern (you buy the external device, then the documentation points you to the app store downloads). I have also done app development as a non-commercial side project, writing a PvP game/stat tracking app for the game Destiny 2, this is a free app that has about a thousand users on iOS and a few hundred on Android, written in Kotlin Multiplatform. That started pre-LLM and I've continued to avoid using LLMs while working on it to make sure I can remember how to code sans LLMs, though the fact that Destiny 2 is stopping new development as of June 9th means I'm unlikely to put much effort into it going forward.
• BigBalli 5mo ago
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• mft_ 5mo ago
  From the perspective of this intermediate/hobbyist level Python amateur who never quite got to grips with Swift, it's a paradigm shift. For all manner of simple-ish personal apps, Claude can one-shot an MVP in a few minutes, pulling all of the Swift/UI boilerplate together (which would have taken me hours if not days via tutorials) which I can then easily tweak and iterate to my heart's content. It also supports the 'native is better' apprpach. For example, I recently started with Powerflow [0] which I really like except for the size of it, and created a Swift version [1] in an hour of Claude plus manual tweaks. It's been running quietly on my laptop ever since. The downside is that it brings Apple's iOS restrictions into sharper relief: being able to easily write widgets and apps to suit my needs but then being unable to run then for longer than a week on my own hardware without paying $99 a year is especially frustrating. [0] https://github.com/lzt1008/powerflow https://github.com/lzt1008/powerflow [1] https://github.com/Tom1827/powerflow-swift https://github.com/Tom1827/powerflow-swift
• esafak 5mo ago
  Software engineering is flattening. I wouldn't go into 'pure' app development but specialize in a regulated field, unless I had entrepreneurship aspirations, in which case now is a great time to enter the field.
• Ozzie-D 5mo ago
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• qrush 5mo ago
  I've been dipping my toes back in after nearly 10 years away from native development. I finally just got an Android app shipped to the Play Store for https://wordtrak.com https://wordtrak.com, after several weeks of back and forth with what I am assuming are mostly robots managing the Google side of this. I was stunned to see how far Android distribution has come (and especially that all changes are now reviewed). What I was most surprised by though, was all of the ridiculous red tape around the actual process of getting an app listed. Best example: I had to confirm I didn't change the outcome of the Korean War in order to list on Play Store in Korea. In any case I got most of this done with Claude and expo.dev - it was a huge relief to let Claude Code churn through this and not have to worry about spending months re-learning frameworks and ecosystems.
• Tanxsinxlnx 5mo ago
  idea ->claude ->public
• osfv 5mo ago
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• kowskirz 5mo ago
  A good analogy (I think) is photography. Everyone has a camera, but only a fraction of human beings with a camera are professional photographers. AI is to App Development, what the smartphone is to Photography. Anyone can do it, yet paradoxically, only a few people really "do".
  • deleted 5mo ago
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• kowskirz 5mo ago
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• mazinz 5mo ago
  I have been happy with Dart/Flutter + Cursor + Dart MCP. Feels much more context aware than what I've experienced in other stacks and working with native features was far less painful than I expected. Still need to decide what to build, which is just as hard as it was before, but it's just faster to iterate.
• sminchev 5mo ago
  What currently happens looks really scary. The level of technical skills needed to make and deploy app in production dropped a lot. Everybody are trying to make something. This can be good and bad. Good because increasing the level of concurrency should lead to better end results. At the same time, a lot of people, not knowing what they are doing, they create AI slop. Of course, they have good intentions, and do their best, just the quantity of low-quality apps becomes too big. Open, for example, Reddit, and check the SideProject channel. I counted 1 application per 2 minutes! This is huge! And a lot of it is bad quality, because people have no technical and UI/UX skills. They don't know what architecture, MVC, code review, retrospective, technical documentation, target group, performance, hashing of password, and a lot a lot of things really EXISTS. Even if you make something cool and stable, you just can't popup! And that's the current state. Too much noise!
• mactools895 5mo ago
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• IndustryLens 5mo ago
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• vincenthsin 5mo ago
  From the perspective of my own career in backend application development, the transformative impact that LLMs have brought to the field of application development over the past 1.5 years has exceeded that of the previous 10 (or even longer) years combined. In fact, throughout my 14 years career in backend development and engineering, I have been eagerly awaiting something -- like the LLMs -- that would envolve the application development. As I feel that the most tedious and boring part of backend application development is "translating" business logic into technical code—and this happens to be precisely where LLMs excel. This does not means that writing code is invaluable or is no longer necessary; it simply means that this particular task no longer must be performed by humans personally. I suspect most people would agree that LLMs do not represent the ultimate path to AGI. Given this, why should we fear LLMs rather than embracing them? What exactly are we afraid of? After all, the tasks that LLMs are capable of handling are merely those that are most tedious and dull for humans. Yet, ultimately, who is it that defines and validates the software application ? The answer remains: humans! To enable humans to fully exercise their judgment and decision-making capabilities, while entrusting those tedious, monotonous daily tasks to LLMs—is this not precisely the tremendous boon we have been hoping for? I know this is easier said than done—hard to accept. Yet, developers need a job to earn a living and support their families. In this day and age, if one focuses exclusively on App development, what exactly do the career prospects look like? When it comes to the field of App development, I believe that the role and very essence of developers are poised to undergo a radical transformation. We should no longer limit ourselves to merely translating business logic into code; instead, we ought to pursue our niche—specifically, those tasks that rely primarily on judgment and creativity.
• MarcelinoGMX3C 5mo ago
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• EmanuelB 5mo ago
  From my perspective biggest shift is that people that would never have made anything digital 10 years ago are now making their own apps and websites. It is cool to see because often they make things that currently do not exist. The downside is that we software people that have been in the trenches for a while also learn about laws, cyber security and other topics that you should know, but claude won’t tell you unless you know what to ask for. These people have never heard about any of these things, and what I have seen so far getting built ranges from slightly risky to straight up super illegal. All without no clue what they are doing, no warning from claude, and the timeline from zero to launching something illegal can now be done by the average person in an evening. This is both good and bad. We get more new stuff, people enjoy creating these websites, but they risk themselves and others people in the process. Like a kid being allowed to drive a partly autonomous car. The super annoying thing I have encountered are managers and other low technical people with some influence over engineers that now believe they ”know the limitations of AI” because they managed to make a CRUD demo in 30min. More than once have someone in my vicinity expected claude to one shot an algorithm that might be physically impossible to even do. I have also seen people try to ”prove” that it is possible by having claude make this algorithm on some toy example where the output looks okay at first glance, but with no verification that it is actually correct. And now the engineers ”just need to take it to production”. AI have made any professional software development 100x worse in my experience. Annoying people that previously could be convinced that certain things are not quick and easy are now extra stubborn, extra annoying, extra time consuming to deal with. Therefore, in my professional life, AI is a big net negative when it comes to efficient use of time. AI made all bad things worse, and barely brought anything good with it. I am convinced that it doesn’t have to be like this, but most organizations are dysfunctional to some level, and that just became worse. If I could go back in time, I would not have gone into software engineering. I love the field, but there is just too much BS going on. I also see and hear about tiny teams being more effective than ever, teams that already have the skills to know what they are building, and how. They can ship more, faster, and still ensure reliability because they know what they are doing, and they are allowed to spend the time if needed to ensure things are done correctly (without AI powered ”managers” standing in their way). I think we will see many small companies literally come out of nowhere, no funding, no big names behind them and completely crush companies 1000x their size because of AI. I also believe big slow organizations will use AI to become less efficient and ship worse products while panicking on their way down, ensuring ”all in on AI” by sending more emails faster than ever. More easy problems will be solved than ever, every imaginable easy problem will be possible for anyone to solve. The hard novel problems will remain unsolved, remain difficult and only the smartest, most stubborn, most stupid people will attempt to solve them, and if they do, the market will reward them.
• arpansac 5mo ago
  From my recent engagement on social media and in developer communities, these are the top things that I could come across: 1. On social media, people are mostly talking about getting approval for the App Store or the Play Store, rather than how they built their app, its structure, or the problems. 2. On social media, they are talking about promoting and marketing their app, whether it is a mobile app or a web app. I guess this thread is about a mobile app. 3. In developer communities, it does not matter anymore. You give them a problem, and they will come back with an application for it. For people who are early in their career, they are far from knowing even Git. There are keys publicly mentioned in their GitHub repository, and the code structure is nowhere to be present. On the other side, when I talk to tech teams through developer communities, for a lot of them who have adapted AI very well, they seem to be in heaven because they are working on multiple threads together. A lot of people have created a workspace where frontend and backend code is edited by agents that are hierarchically distributed across. I think shipping is getting faster and faster, and obviously the feedback loop has also multiplied, owing to more bugs to be fixed. When I mention developer communities, I have my platform with more than 300,000 people signed up on it, so you can consider my experience to be valid
• s_a_r_a 5mo ago
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