Sensor Tower: the number of new apps released in Apple's App Store doubled to ~560K in H1, vs. the ~600K added in all of 2025, as vibecoded apps flood the store
Context & Ripple Effects
The App Store’s publisher economy had already been expanding: Sensor Tower projected 906 developers would clear $1M in annual revenue for the first time in 2021, while consumer app spending reached a record in H1 2021 even as overall install growth slowed. The new release surge changes the supply side of that market far more abruptly, with AI-assisted “vibecoding” lowering the effort needed to publish.
First-order effects
- Apple’s App Store must absorb a sharply larger flow of submissions, increasing the immediate importance of review, quality control, and store ranking in determining what users see.
- New and existing developers face a more crowded launch environment: publishing is easier, but gaining visibility and downloads becomes harder as similar apps proliferate.
Second-order effects
- Competition for App Store discovery is likely to intensify, making search placement and other distribution channels more consequential for developers as organic browsing becomes less reliable.
- The surge may widen the gap between app creation and app monetization. Earlier growth in developers reaching meaningful revenue showed a viable publisher economy, but a larger catalog does not itself create additional demand.
Third-order effects
- If AI-assisted development continues to raise app supply faster than user attention, app marketplaces will increasingly function as curation and trust systems rather than simply distribution catalogs.
- The pattern points toward a mobile software market with lower barriers to entry but potentially more concentrated discovery and revenue, unless platform ranking and review systems surface smaller developers effectively.
The trend: Generative-AI development tools are shifting software bottlenecks from writing code to earning trust, discovery, and sustained user demand in app marketplaces.