Ask HN: What Is the State of App Development in 2026? What is going on in the world of pure IOS/Android app development? How is AI/LLMs affecting app development? what has changed in App Development in the past 2-5 years? What does a career in only app development look like nowadays? Thank you! |
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, taking their rubylith, Letraset type, and rubber cement 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.
The fear for me comes with that initial creation, which is a fear i have across a large amount of things for AI "disruption". Just floods of bad products at rates that are insane, same type of problem that exists on github of just garbage prs, and same thing for any reddit/twitter/even hn type comment thread.
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.
It’s not super onerous, but it is much more annoying than the theoretical alternative of allowing people to install software of their choosing on their hardware (i.e. download the binary and run it)
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.
That is the real issue. How to get noticed in a sea of slop.
We built iOS first because that's what most of our users have, though the team is mostly on Android.
We built our logic in Rust, so that compiles cross platform. It's really just the UI layer that is per platform.
Though I had initially written our first demo in React-Native, the team wanted to go with native UI.
Lately we've been talking about moving the timeline for our Android app up because we can get AI to help using the iOS app as a foundation.
I haven't seen anything really new and compelling in iOS/Android land. The promise of right once run anywhere continues to be a promise, and the bluetooth libraries across different devices (particularly in Android land) has me concerned.
Having never created a mobile app, how's that work exactly?
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.
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.
Mostly for fun/scratch my own itch, and using AI as a companion/helper device.
The market is saturated for new apps.
Anytime I let lose AI (Both Codex and Claude), they end up producing slop that is overcomplicated, and that looks like a generic tutorial interface. Great for toy apps but not for serious one.
When I do most of the architecture, and use AI to 'fill in the blanks' or just finish some functionality here and there, then AI is great.
The main reason is that it is trained by public code that is mostly tutorials, and simple apps, so AI can't build a great looking one by itself (or it doesn't how to do large apps). But for specific features, it is great.
TLDR: It is still a 'fill in the funcionality here' type of help. Folks that are successful with letting 'multiple agents' running in the background are mostly for backend work where the results are easier to verify.
Also, there is a lot of LARPING in twitter sphere exaggerating what AI can realistically do right now. But I can see how it can affect entry level jobs. AI is still like an CS intern, or very very junior engineer.
For example the iOS app failed first time as I accidentally used "Free" in the app name, and the app declared support for UIBackgroundModes but they were "unable to locate any features that require persistent audio". The dictation keyboard switched you to the app, then if you left would keep recording... fairly basic and obvious stuff. I could have either gone back and argued the case, or simply rip it out which I opted for.
It's now failed again because: The keyboard extension does not provide any functionality when the "Full Access" setting is toggled off.
Well no, hardly my fault you've locked down the usefulness of third-party keyboards, but now I've added a full keyboard in there so it's a bit more useful without that access. I don't expect any users to ever see this. Admittedly this was more frustrating when that would be a couple days work, not just a quick prompt, to fix.
Good luck with your app. Don't worry too much, you can generally work through their issues... but it can be a slow process. Make sure you leave plenty of time between your submission and when you want to launch!