The meteoric rise in new apps on the App Store is a recent trend, according to data from digital intelligence firm Sensor Tower. Until last year, new apps added to the App Store were slowly declining, declining by 48% from 2016 to 2024. Again, 2025 saw nearly 600,000 new apps on the App Store, which is in line with a 30% increase globally, and is a new trend that looks to accelerate in 2026.
Apart from the increasing number of app launches, 2025 was also the year of vibe coding, i.e. getting artificial intelligence to write code for you. The release of Anthropic’s Cloud Code in early 2025, followed by OpenAI’s Codex, made it so that average people with no coding or software development experience could use those AI tools and plain English to build apps. OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy first coined the term in February 2025 and by the end of the year, it became the Collins English Dictionary’s word of the year for 2025.
Excited by the potential for productivity and profit-maximization, CEOs and other executives in Silicon Valley and the rest of the corporate world jumped on the trend fanatically, and some even cut jobs for trained coders and software engineers. The corporate world was so quick to jump on this trend that stock market investors were convinced that vibe coding was the endgame for software companies. Meanwhile, vibe coding tools made inroads beyond the corporate world and became the next hot trend for side hustle enthusiasts.
But those Vibe coded apps are far from perfect. They often host so many AI-generated problems that the trend has even given rise to a new class of coders called “vibe coding cleanup experts.”
But even though vibe-coding may have had a hand in the App Store’s renaissance last year, Apple isn’t that thrilled about vibe-coding apps on its platform. Last month, the App Store removed three of the top Vibe coding apps—Replit, Vibecode, and Anything—claiming they violated App Store guidelines. Apple is particularly concerned about these vibe coding apps that help their users create and use apps on Apple devices without submitting them for Apple’s approval. Apple has its own answer to the coding vibe in the form of Xcode, its tool for app developers, which now has autonomous coding functionality through AI agents that review and edit code.
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