The Apple App store is seeing an unexpected phenomenon. Is vibe coding behind it?

What’s behind a new wave of apps in the Apple App store? It’s probably two words: vibe coding. Apple’s App Store was flooded with 235,800 new apps in the first quarter of this year—an increase of 84% over the same time last year, according to new data published by The Information—after steady declines of 48% from 2016 to 2024. That builds on a trend from last year, in which developers created a whopping 600,000 new apps, leaving people wondering what is behind the big push. It turns out—perhaps not surprisingly, with artificial intelligence tools making it easier to create an app more quickly—that there’s more apps flooding into Apple’s App store. What’s this have to do with vibe coding? “Vibe coding” is using generative artificial intelligence to write code, which is how developers write computer programs. Andrej Karpathy, co-founder of OpenAI, coined the term last February, explaining on X, “there’s a new kind of coding I call &#8