App Store Flooded With AI-Built Apps as Apple Cracks Down on Vibe Coding Tools

Apple's App Store is experiencing the fastest growth in new app launches in its history, but the surge hasn't come without friction. Around 560,000 new apps appeared on the App Store in the first half of 2026, nearly as many as in all of 2025. The driver is a wave of so-called vibe coding, a technique for building software by describing features in natural language and letting artificial intelligence handle the rest.

The scale of the phenomenon shows up most clearly when compared with download figures, which are growing far more slowly than launch numbers. Users downloaded 35.4 billion apps in all of 2025, up 3 percent year over year. In the first half of 2026, downloads totaled 17.6 billion, just 2 percent more than the same period a year earlier. The market, in other words, is producing far more apps than it can absorb.

Coding Without a Developer

Vibe coding lets people with no programming background describe an idea in words, leaving the rest of the work to artificial intelligence, which generates working code. Tools of this kind have cut the time needed to build a simple app from weeks to days, sometimes hours. Developer Marco Pérez built an app called InfoDrizzle this way in seven weeks, earning 1,300 downloads and about $500 in profit, and completed a follow-up, Stampa, in a single week, which has already racked up 20,000 downloads and roughly $3,000 in profit. Another creator, David Svensson, released eleven niche apps over five months.

This production model is also changing how apps make money. Many of the newly launched programs rely on advertising rather than in-app purchases, which cuts into Apple's commission revenue, since the company doesn't take a cut of ad income the way it does of in-app transactions.

The Fight Over Guideline 2.5.2

Alongside the wave of new launches, a dispute is growing between Apple and the makers of vibe coding tools. The contested App Store guideline 2.5.2 bars apps from downloading, installing, or running code that changes their functionality after Apple has approved them. The rule was designed as a safeguard against unverified software, but it clashes directly with the idea behind tools that generate entire apps on user request and let people test them on the phone right away.

The most high-profile case involves Anything, an app that let creators preview the iOS programs they were building directly on their device. Apple removed it from the App Store, reinstated it, then removed it again within a single day. Anything co-founder Dhruv Amin described it to TechCrunch as a long saga with no prior issues that changed overnight.

It's been a long saga. We built the mobile app mainly so our users building iOS apps could preview their own app on their own device while they were making it. Up until December, we had no issues at all. After December, we, along with everyone else in this category, started getting our updates blocked. - Dhruv Amin, co-founder of Anything

Amin tried to work around the problem by submitting an update that let users preview generated apps in a web browser instead of directly within the app. Apple blocked that version anyway and pulled the app from the store. Replit reported similar problems with enforcement of guideline 2.5.2, having an update blocked despite years of compliance with the store's rules.

Risk of a Low-Quality Flood

The sharp rise in launches is raising concerns about quality and security. The more apps that flood into the store in a short period, the harder it becomes for the review system to filter out low-quality, misleading, or outright malicious software. There have already been cases where fake or harmful apps slipped through Apple's review process unnoticed before being taken down.

Most of the new listings are mobile games, but there's also a clear uptick in productivity, utilities, lifestyle, and health and fitness categories, areas where a simple, single-function app can be assembled from AI-generated building blocks in a single day.

What This Means for the Market

The situation puts Apple in a bind that concerns any app store that has built its reputation on quality control. On one hand, the company wants to protect users from unverified code running on their devices; on the other, its own rules seem ill-suited to a category of tools growing faster than any other in the store's history. Developers of these apps are demanding a clear decision: either consistent enforcement of the current rules, or an update to them that reflects the new way software is being built.

For Polish app developers and small software houses, this means growing competition from individuals with no engineering background who can ship a working product within a week. At the same time, the rising risk that Apple will tighten its guidelines further could cut off, at any moment, the tools this business model depends on, making the industry unusually unstable for new players betting on rapid release cycles.