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Comment by Gareth321 | Hacker News Reader

I think Apple will become increasingly draconian about LLMs. Very soon people won't need to buy many of their apps. They can just make them. This threatens Apple's entire business model.

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It came out in the Epic trial that 90% of App Store revenue comes from in app purchases of loot boxes and other pay to win mechanics.

Apple doesn’t care about revenue from a random TODO app.

truly a k-shaped economy we live in

From games? Why would people pay to play those games when they can make their own?

You’re not going to make a game using AI.

Not yet, which is the point of this discussion.

But… why would I put the effort into getting an llm to make me an app when a there’s an existing app that I don’t have to maintain? I don’t want to have to make every app I use?

There's a huge difference between local apps that cost one time 3-10$ and apps that ask for a subscription between 5 to 20$ per month. the first category will remain and might become more popular as quality increases, the second category will be oblitereated as the value isn't there, even if all the buyers are rich. The second group takes up a much larger part of the pie than the first though, so apple's revenue will decrease.

All apps that don't have a tangible component, legal protection (like music, tv, movies), or a personality behind it will trend towards $0.

It depends on the value of your time relative to the price of the application. Many of us here are well paid and time poor. It makes sense to pay for well built apps. For the world, we are truly the top 1%. 99% of people would be happy to spend a few hours building an app they need to occasionally maintain. Especially if the app is subscription based.

We should also remember that the effort of building and maintaining apps is dropping precipitously as LLMs get smarter, faster, and cheaper. OpenClaw signalled the direction in which we're heading, and within a year, Anthropic will no doubt have cheap and competent agents which can handle the maintenance autonomously in the background.

This is why SaaS valuations are getting hammered.

> 99% of people would be happy to spend a few hours building an app they need to occasionally maintain. Especially if the app is subscription based.

With people slowly abandoning dedicated computers they fully control (if we can even call windows/macOS that) and going towards mobile/tablet computing more every year, which is a far more locked down device run by companies that are becoming increasingly hostile to “side-loading,” I just don’t see how this can become reality.

Apple's business model isn't really affected by 2% of its users choosing not to spend $100/yr on the App Store. That isn't even a blip on the radar.

A kid playing Roblox can spend more than that in a good weekend.

VibeOS. It’s just an LLM from which all other userspace is vibed.

vibe-ls(1) - often list directory contents, but maybe do something else.

Where can I get this amazing technology?

I guess I am not seeing why would I want to abandon most (if any) of my simple, small, purpose-built apps that always do the exact thing I want for a private company’s ever-changing LLM that will approximate what I’m asking and approximate its response utilizing far more resources.

I’m sure there are things on my phone it could replace (though I struggle to think of them) but there are plenty it can’t. My black magic camera app, web browsers, local send, libby/hoopla…

I can’t really think of any apps I use every day - or every week - that an LLM would replace. I’m not coding on my smartphone and aside from that an LLM is basically a more complex, somewhat inconsistent search engine experience right now for most people. Siri didn’t replace any of my apps, for instance. Why would chatGPT?

TL;DR: what apps would an LLM replace on my iPhone?

They are said to be introducing a framework to make it easier to integrate modern LLMs into apps in a couple of months at WWDC.

https://9to5mac.com/2026/03/01/apple-replacing-core-ml-with-...

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