Apple’s App Store saw 235,800 new apps in the first three months of 2026, according to new data published by The Information on Sunday, up 84% from the same time period last year.
The meteoric rise in new apps on the App Store is a fairly recent trend, according to data from digital intelligence firm Sensor Tower. Until last year, new apps added to the App Store had been gradually declining, down 48% from 2016 to 2024. Then, 2025 saw nearly 600,000 new apps on the App Store, corresponding to 30% growth globally, and a new trend that seems to be accelerating into 2026.
Beyond just soaring app launches, 2025 was also the year of vibe coding, aka having artificial intelligence write code for you. The release of Anthropic’s Claude Code in early 2025, followed by OpenAI’s Codex, made it so that Average Joes with no coding or software development experience could use those AI tools and plain English to build apps. OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy first coined the term in February 2025, and by the end of the year, it had become Collins English Dictionary’s word of the year for 2025.
Excited by the potential for productivity and profit-maximization, CEOs and other executives in Silicon Valley and throughout the rest of the corporate world jumped on the trend fanatically, and some even put the jobs of trained coders and software engineers on the chopping block. The corporate world was so quick to jump on the trend that stock market investors became convinced that vibe coding spelled the end times for software companies. Meanwhile, vibe coding tools infiltrated beyond the corporate world as well and became the next hot trend for side hustle enthusiasts.
But those vibe coded applications are far from perfect. They often play host to so many AI-generated problems that the trend has even led to a new class of coders called “vibe coding cleanup specialists.”
But even though vibe-coding could have had a hand in the App Store Renaissance of the past year, Apple isn’t all that thrilled about the vibe coding apps on its own platform. Last month, the App Store removed three of the top vibe coding apps—Replit, Vibecode, and Anything—claiming that they violated App Store guidelines. Apple is specifically worried about these vibe coding apps assisting their users to build and use apps on Apple devices without first submitting them for Apple’s approval. Apple does have its own answer to vibe coding in the form of Xcode, its tool for app developers, which now has autonomous coding functionality through AI agents that review and edit code.
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