Study finds agentic AI tools sparked a 180% surge in iOS app releases while user adoption fell to 75%

I think the challenge is that everyone can now build apps

But

1) almost nobody has distribution (like an audience), or

2) the money to pay for distribution (ads or UGC), or

3) the creative genius to get distribution for free (classically called guerilla marketing)

There are about the same number of people with smartphones vs 12 months ago: more apps doesn't mean they'd spend more time using apps.

And so more apps thanks to AI means more competition, and more expensive to acquire new users: even for existing apps!

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.

The good news: agentic is leading to lots of new apps!

The bad news: ain’t nobody adopting them.

Slop FTL [for the loss]

Massive output uptick due to agentic AI. Complete flat adoption.

@jenzhuscott It’s the Ikea of personal app era. I assembled my tool

@jenzhuscott @alexolegimas Maybe because people are using ChatGPT for everything.

@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 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 😂

@jenzhuscott @calvinfroedge Slop garbage

@BijouConcierge @levelsio Most people think a funnel on 𝕏 is 100 comments a day.

@levelsio It’s always been the same. Building was not that easy but still easy if you had 2000$ for your idea.

It seems easy now because everyone is building their slop apps without finishing them.

@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

You don’t need to hack going viral with some new format. There are many existing formats that have been consistently going viral for months if not years. Literally copy those.

No ad spend or UGC necessary. In many cases, your face or voice doesn’t even need to be in it.

Go on TikTok, find a format that operates in a problem space you’re passionate about, build the app for that and upload videos with the same viral format.

Attaching my own numbers just to show I’m not speaking out of my ass here - never spent a dollar on ads.

@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

@levelsio The old soft skills: communication, persuasion, relationships are slowly becoming the new hard skills. They’re not “nice to have”, they’re required to harvest attention.

@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.

@levelsio I found that even if you have the money, creating ads that convert is extremely hard! you really need to understand people, there is no way around it, there's no AI hack yet (although it can help sharpen ideas with gstack office hours 😁)