Comment by skybrian
1 day ago
Sometimes “better” means “customized for my specific use case.” I expect that there will be a lot of custom software that never appears in any app store.
1 day ago
Sometimes “better” means “customized for my specific use case.” I expect that there will be a lot of custom software that never appears in any app store.
The amount of single purpose scripts in my ~/playground/ folder has increased dramatically over the past year. Super useful, wouldn’t have had the time for it otherwise, but not in any way shareable. Eg “parse this excel sheet I got from my obscure bank and upload it to my budgeting app’s REST API”. Wouldn’t have had the time or energy to do this before, now I have it and it scratches an itch.
This. Just today I added a full on shopping list system to our internal dashboard at work (small business) simply because it was slightly annoying and could be solved in 3 prompts and 15 minutes.
If we take it a step further, in a few years, why would anyone purchase generic software anymore? If we can perfectly customise software for our needs and preferences for almost free, why would anyone purchase generic software from an App Store? I genuinely think Apple's business model is in jeopardy.
Most apps aren’t standalone and the services they depend on are nontrivial to build. For example, maybe you could vibe code a guitar tuner app, but not a ride share app.
I agree. The services which will be left standing will be those with a competitive moat: critical mass (Tinder, Facebook), content (YouTube, AppleTV), and scale (frontier AI models requiring expensive hardware), etc.
That said, if you look at the apps on your phone, I wager a large proportion don't have these moats. Translation, passwords, budget, reminders, email, to do, project management, messaging, browser, calendar, fitness, games, game tracking, etc.
Customization often turns out to be a long term liability. Funnily enough, my employer learned this 20 years ago with our ERP and we are still paying the price.