What Is the State of App Development in 2026?

It is bad. Layoffs everywhere. Google is becoming apple. Companies want you to do the job of 6 engineers using ai.

The market is saturated for new apps.

I'm have a game on both app stores, built in .net Maui. It earns enough to keep a roof over my head.

AI is useless when developing with Maui, as it's too new of a development framework for any AI's knowledgebase to have a clue what to do with it.

My perspective: I've been supporting and working with Mac and iOS developers since the last century, when Apple moved me from Chicago to be an evangelist at Apple HQ in Cupertino. I know as much as anyone about AI-assisted app development, as the creator/maintainer of the free/open source Axiom (https://charleswiltgen.github.io/Axiom/) for iOS/macOS devs.

It's not as dire as you might think. To software developers, the "AI revolution" is largely what the "desktop publishing revolution" was to designers. Yes, it meant the "riff raff" could theoretically play with the pros. Some percentage of the riff raff became pros. Most of the pros eventually adopted the tools and techniques used by the riff raff. Some of the pros didn't survive the transition and happily retired, their rubylith, Letraset type, and rubber cement retiring with them.

The silver lining is that most of a software engineer's job isn't coding, it's thinking. LLMs can't do that, and we're not getting to AGI with current AI architectures. LLMs can amplify thinking, and an LLM in the hands of a software engineer or architect is at least two orders of magnitude more effective than it can be in the hands of a vibe coder. As LLMs get better for vibe coders, they also get better for pros.

One can argue that, by the end of the decade, hand-coded [your language of choice] may be considered as unnecessary as hand-coded assembly has been for decades. But coding in modern languages is already 7-8 levels of abstraction above the metal. One more level of abstraction is not the death of software engineering, IMO.

I had a go at building both a Mac and iOS dictation app the other day (dictator.robgough.net) thinking that with Claude's input, this probably wouldn't work... but it was a real problem I had, and I wanted to see how far we could get. Best way to learn the tools, right? I'd already spent the day playing with alternative apps that didn't quite do what I wanted.

The app itself is fairly straightforward, but it included some intermediate complexity in terms of audio capture and calling local models. Both something I'd never done, and as not-a-mac dev something I probably wouldn't have attempted for a side-project while I'm meant to be bootstrapping my own thing.

I didn't touch a line of code, and I was blown away. I'm so impressed in fact that I'm predicting we'll see a resurgence in native apps in the near future. By far the worst (and slowest) part of the process is having to deal with the App Store, and the ridiculous hoops you have to jump through to get past review.

I don't install apps unless it's for an event or something. I just make my own to fit my needs. I can get a functional pwa out in about a day or two now.

I suspect AI is going to result in the bottom falling out of the market for simple apps.

React made simple webapps a case of just gluing dependencies together and much more approachable to a generalist developer than the previous generation of web development was. But native apps weren’t affected in the same way. With AI I suspect we’ll see a lot of simple apps, the ones that really aren’t doing much other than CRUD operations on a remote API, become very heavily AI generated by generalist developers.

But there will still remain a healthy market for working on considerably more complex apps.

I am building an app that is for a niche market, and I wouldn't have started without LLMs.

The hard part of this app is great design, requiring intentionally designed workflows and lots of real world testing. The code isn't the interesting part and now code isn't taking most of my time. It's great!

Once the design is nailed down and workflows tightened up, I don't expect much active development and can focus on distribution and marketing.

As a solo dev, this feels totally doable but ask me in 6 months.

I’ve been thinking about this—if I wanted to learn iOS dev where should I start? (Book preferred.)

Mostly for fun/scratch my own itch, and using AI as a companion/helper device.

It's incredibly easy to make apps nowadays, it's all about distribution (usually on social media).

With artificial intelligence, the nature of engineering is shifting, making competition much more intense than before. Therefore, we need to learn how to get the most out of AI. You can think of it like this: just as books were written by hand in the past, now AI is doing what printing presses used to do. But don't lose hope, because no printing press can be as creative as a human; it can only speed things up.