Oversupply makes user acquisition more expensive in a flat market
This is a great chart for why we should look at things like productivity and not “shipping” for signals of AI-driven economic acceleration. The former is a function of what people value enough to actually spend money on, the latter could be a proxy for it…but not necessarily.
Massive output uptick due to agentic AI. Complete flat adoption.
Many users criticized the agentic AI app release boom as flooding markets with useless garbage and dystopian overproduction that fails to drive adoption, while a few praised charts or noted potential wins for individual developers.
@jenzhuscott It’s the Ikea of personal app era. I assembled my tool
@jenzhuscott @alexolegimas Maybe because people are using ChatGPT for everything.
@jenzhuscott Everyone thinking if they only knew how to code they can ship a great app. Now everyone can ship an app, it turns out all the ideas are just shit 😂
@apexlearn_org @kiknaio @jenzhuscott Yes but we can’t ignore the type of task. I’m not buying on chatgpt, I’m doing research. I’m not editing images on chatgpt, I’m maybe removing an item or generating a pretend background. Certain things will change, because there’s a new tool, and before this, everything was web.
@jenzhuscott Output was never the bottleneck. I can ship in a weekend now what took years.
The flat part is distribution. Everyone's shipping more, nobody's solved who sees it.
@jenzhuscott @calvinfroedge Slop garbage
@jenzhuscott 1000 apps doing exactly same thing will never achieve even moderate success. The only difference is developers name . Barring extremely good 1 or 2 apps rest all will perish before the next 1000 release
@jenzhuscott Building is easy. Getting users is hard. Retaining users is hard. Building a profitable business is hardest.
@jenzhuscott "You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics" -Robert Solow, 1987
@jenzhuscott We’re entering an era where shipping an app is easy and getting 1,000 active users is the hard part.
@jenzhuscott I bet a lot of these are previous/would-have-been SaaS customers. Rising subscription costs for new AI features, but most small businesses still have simple needs. It’s cheaper now to build your own inventory tool with the help of AI than to pay for an inventory tool that has AI.
The trend is clear: agentic traffic on the web has just surpassed human users.
It means two things: more tasks overall and the same tasks shifting to agentic systems.
The same shift humans made from physical shopping to e-commerce will happen again, but with a shorter transition period.
Today’s software UIs are the B&M shopping experience before the e-commerce era.
Nothing will disappear; the composition will change forever as a paradigm shift.
@jenzhuscott @apexlearn_org I don't think app adoption will increase. I thought the tendency was for it to go down.
@jenzhuscott distribution / user acquisition / building a community around your product has always been the real moat. Building mobile apps wasn’t that difficult even 10+ years ago! Many devs built thousands of iOS apps when the iPhone first came out but a tiny percentage remained relevant.
@apexlearn_org To be fair adoption always takes time.
@jenzhuscott @dennisihong Human attention span is limited, even if number of Apps can be limitless …
Just simple law of nature
@jenzhuscott @abkaaar Correct. Just creating a good app doesn’t mean anyone will use it
Conversely, you build a total trash pile and if you can get enough influencers to hype it, everyone will be using it, no matter how painful it is to use
Honestly the reviews line going down is the part worth staring at.
Not just flat. Actually declining. Which means users aren't just ignoring these apps, they're bothering to say something negative before they leave.
That's a UX problem, not a market problem. Someone still has to care about what happens after the code ships.
@apexlearn_org @kiknaio @jenzhuscott UI is not going anywhere. UI will only go away when we stop using technology as a medium to interact with the services we need. UI will change, but there will always be some form of UI. There’s a reason why we moved off calling a call centres to perform basic admin things.
@jenzhuscott @jeremyphoward Yeah, it’s very easy to create slop, basically. Comes back to the idea that just because now we can do something doesn’t mean we should.
