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Comment by anovikov | Hacker News Reader

If AI makes people so much more productive, why aren't there much more apps on the Apple store? Mobile apps involve a lot of dirty, boring scaffolding work which AI automated first thing, 2 years ago easily. It should've been the very first place where productivity boost should've been evident, a year ago at least. But it's just not there. Why not?

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App Store releases are increasing due to a new gold rush on subscription apps. Review times have gotten longer as the review team at Apple is being spammed.

Most of these apps are rudimentary habit trackers, time management apps etc. so not much creativity, much more recycled ideas. More code != better ideas though.

https://www.a16z.news/i/185469925/app-store-engage https://42matters.com/ios-apple-app-store-statistics-and-tre...

Also a lot more clone ideas these days. AI has definitely empowered people to write things from scratch, either as a product to sell or as internal projects inside companies.

Heh, I guess Apple needs to better use AI to review all the AI-written apps.

End of 2022: 1,783,232 apps

End of 2023: 1,870,119 apps

End of 2024: 1,961,596 apps

Now: 2,150,612 apps, after 1.18 years.

+160k apps a year, that's only 84% above pre-AI era (safe to say that apps were not routinely built with AI in 2023 yet). Noticeable increase but doesn't feel dramatic, especially since yes, majority of those new apps are low-effort trash like those described in this thread.

> If AI makes people so much more productive, why aren't there much more apps on the Apple store

There are more apps, and webpages, and software and whole lot of stuff.

It's just not good

Yeah, AI people like to talk about how their kid made a mario bros game in a weekend, so big adults should be doing crysis clones in same time, right?

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