A (4:23)

At a more fundamental level though, does AI change our relationship to apps? So will people, will somebody just say, hey, ChatGPT, I want to run a 5K and ChatGPT is just going to coach them through running a 5K instead of downloading Runa or Strava or couch to 5K or any of the hundreds of running apps out there?

B (4:44)

That's a really interesting question. I think it's certainly a very relevant question. I think it's tbd, but I think the, the, there's a bigger question there which is like, are you saying hey, chatgpt, who are you saying hey to? Right? Because that's not necessarily settled science, that ChatGPT just wins the category, right? And so the question is like, do you just sort of, Is it turtles all the way down and up, right? Like, where do you go for that information? Is it ChatGPT or does someone unseat ChatGPT as the go to, like, verb for discovery? Right, but my sense is, look, I mean, you remember all of Apple's promises to WDCs ago, where they, they rolled out Apple intelligence, they talked about app intents and none of that came to pass, right? They, they talked about this overhauled Siri, none of that came to pass. Now that's not because it's fundamentally impossible. That's just because Apple didn't do a good job on execution. But like, I, I don't know if you remember with the app intent stuff and they, they like mapped out this whole series of interaction flows. And the reason I remember this is I just, I remember writing about it. So I just looked it up before we started talking. Cause I, I wrote a whole piece about like, will this disrupt the app economy? Because that's the same question people are asking. If you've got app intents, do I need to interact with the app at all? Like, if I need to do something in that app, I'll just ask Siri. It'll go in, it's got, you've got the app intents, it'll hook into those and it' everything for me. And what I, you know, sort of hypothesized was like, when this comes to fruition, and it will, at some point it was like, yeah, maybe the category winners just run away with everything. Because I'm not going to say, hey, Siri, open up one of my ride sharing apps and book me a ride to the movies. I'm going to say open up Uber, because that's the dominant one, right? And so that could become, you know, that could become the new dynamic that we play in. But, but I don't think where I don't think we're going to end up is like some sort of agent that orchestrates everything for us. And there's no UI in any app because it's all just AP or just like MCP interfaces. I don't think we're going to end up there. And like, to your question about like with Strava, my sense is like the sort of chat bot interface that we see now is limited in a lot of, like, really fundamental ways. And at some point, you know, people just prefer things that are more tactile and more interactive. Now, maybe ChatGPT could replicate that, but, like, that feels like a standalone interaction use case that you'd have to construct. And I don't know that, you know, certainly not in the current interface. But I mean, this stuff changes all the time. But, like, could they just have an interface for everything and the running is, you know, learning how to run or whatever, tracking you're running is one and cooking is another and, you know, whatever. My sense is, like, that probably ends up not being super meaningful for them in the same way, like, why didn't Facebook do that? Because ultimately, like, you're going to have your core business and that's going to dominate everything. And so building out all these, like, use cases of specific, like, functionality are not going to be valuable enough for you to even do.

A (7:19)

And I think people, the kind of AI takes over everything bulls are underestimating the product that takes place. That all the people at Strava who've been building this product over years and have that knowledge and have new features they're continuing to add on in a weekly monthly cadence, you just. You don't get that. And so at some point, ChatGPT or some LLM is a better product manager than human product managers, and it can just, like, build the perfect interface. But I think we're a long way from that being true. But then what about, like, vibe coding? Are people just going to vibe code their own 5K app?

B (7:58)

No, I mean, that's going to be like a hobbyist effort. I mean, the thing is, you know, coding has never really been the core limitation of getting an app done. Right. It's, you know, and I mean, you'll see this. I mean, like, yeah, you could probably Vibe code like a recipe app or something that works just as well as anything you get off the Internet. But. But even then, probably not, right? Because, like, it's the specialization and it's managing the edge cases and it's having, you know, gotten user feedback. I mean, if you're just vibe coding something from scratch, it's not gonna be very good. I mean, you're going in there with just your intuition versus, like an app that's successful. And the App Store is actually operating off of, like, this long history of feedback. Right? And that's it's been improved over time. Right. And that's why, you know, there's a survivorship bias kind of thing there. Right. And so Look, I mean, you know, this was a question when a lot of no code tools were released to allow people to like, you know, publish a game in like an afternoon, right? I mean, like, it's essentially no different from using probably actually easier with the no code tools to make a, like a very simple, superficial, hyper casual game than it is to do it with ChatGPT, because then you're still dealing with XCODE and publishing. You have to get a DUNS number as you know, you have to get, you know, get an Apple developer ID and all that kind of stuff. I mean, you know, and I mean you still have to do that with the, with the, you know, like a build box or something. But still it's, it's, it's, it's a visual interface for doing that. And that didn't really, I mean none of those games were commercially successful. And like, here's a good point that I see made a lot, right? It's not mine. Name one successful company that where their product was built by Lovable. Name a single one. Now maybe there's a bunch of people using their own recipe app that they built with Lovable. Can you name a single company? And Lovable, apparently according to them has a lot of ARR. I don't know what words they're substituting in for that acronym, but they say it's ARR. But name me a company that is successful that is built off of Lovable. And I don't think I can name a single one.

A (9:48)

We're still early, so it'll be interesting to see because I do think there is potential for somebody with good intuition and a good idea to go into Lovable and build something that becomes a great app that a lot of people use. So I don't think that's outside of the realm of possibility in the future. But to your point, so far we haven't seen any real breakouts. What we've seen is people who are already building apps and already had that product intuition and do have some amount of code experience. They're the ones really actually succeeding. And then to your earlier point, it's also the ones who figure out distribution. It's not just about the code. And so yeah, you can pull something together and Lovable, but how are you going to actually get it in front of people? And that's still such a huge barrier to entry.

B (10:33)

I do push back and like, maybe, you know, someone would say like, okay, Boomer to this, but I just push back fundamentally on the idea of vibe coding, like an enterprise grade or Scalable product. I just don't think that's possible. And I don't think that's ever going to change, actually. I mean, you just get. You just encounter so many dependencies with writing code, and it has to be done really thoughtfully. I mean, there's a reason, if you talk to like a senior software engineer, if, like they publish 200 lines of code in a day, that's like a big day, right? The biggest part of the job is not writing the code. It's actually thinking through the implications on the code base of what you're publishing. Is it scalable? Is it sustainable? Is it going to break something else? Like, is this going to have to be rewritten in three years? Is extensible? And, you know, I don't vibe code in the sense that I don't go into cursor and tell it to, you know, build me an app that would not be a scalable thing that, you know, could build you like. And you hear this said a lot. I mean, this is, again, this is not like some novel insight, but you can, you can build, build an MVP really quickly with these tools to build something that is stable, that is scalable, that is extensible, that is really difficult. And so I use, I use. Now, don't get me wrong, I mean, I use AI tools all the time for coding, but I want to see and touch every single line of code that goes into a big code base. And I maintain a couple. And what I do is I'll have it write a function for me, right? I'll have it review code, right? But if you talk to anybody who actually writes software, ask them like, what the most fulfilling part of their job is. It's deleting code. It's getting rid of code. It's getting rid of old junk and knowing that you can get rid of it without breaking something and that like refactoring in that way. You know, what you see a lot of people doing with like vibe coding is they'll just start the whole code base over. That clearly doesn't scale for a large enough, like a large enough code base. A, it's going to be more expensive than just having like a software engineer working on it. But, you know, you're just going to be burning tokens all the time. But B, then you're just going to have to do that again and again and again. And you're not going to have the consistency of a code base because some things are going to change each time you do that.

A (12:27)

If you're going to build a Meaningful app. These tools as they exist today and they will get better, but they're not going to support that kind of scalability. They're not going to support that kind of uptime. Yeah. And it just takes a lot more than is still assumed in the AI hype cycle as of today to actually build that kind of great stuff. So. But, you know, things are moving quick, so we'll see how much better things get as things do move quicker and quicker though. The one thing I have heard a lot of people asking about is, is copycats, is that, you know, a skilled developer using AI can move quicker. And so ripping off an app, like, you know, the entire, you know, interaction paradigms, I mean, some are even just ripping off style and like assets from the apps and stuff like that. How do you think about copycats moving forward? That if you have a success within a few days, there's going to be tens of competitors for any app that goes remotely viral?

B (13:23)

A couple of things, right? So one is that's where true design intuition tends to save you and tends to differentiate you. And you know, like you said, I mean, people are just copycatting these features or whatever. And so like, well then people are just piggybacking off of your true, you know, your sort of like inherent design instinct or a skill that you've built up over a long time. It doesn't necessarily like an instinct. They can't build new features that way. Right. I think that ends up differentiating quality experiences from the mass. Right. If someone's just copying what you've done pixel by pixel, there's not much you can do to defend against that. You see this a lot now with, with creatives, right. I mean, this has been an issue for years, right? Like if you have a winning creative, it's copied the next day. And so what do you do? You've got to build a process to always have a winning creative that just shrinks your lead time. And that's just a fact of nature. And like, that didn't stop user acquisition. In fact, it just made it a lot more important to have a scalable process, right. An actual repeatable process for producing winners. And that what that ended up doing was just accelerating like the velocity of stuff that you need. But I think it also made it a lot more process driven, which is not possible to replicate. Like if you're a solo dev, you can't really replicate a process because you don't see it. You can replicate the ad, but you can't replicate the process, which means you'll Always be eating the crumbs. And that's where again you see the primacy of distribution, not production.

A (14:40)

I have been really encouraged to see Apple taking a hard stance on copycats. They updated the rules of the App Store recently, you know, saying copycats will be banned. I've heard from, from several developers who had, you know, blatant ripoff kind of apps where Apple very quickly took them down. So I do think that there will be some onus on the platforms and this is where, where sometimes the platforms can be helpful in, in being able to police some of this stuff. I mean it's not going to be perfect. And you know, folks don't always just completely rip you off. They take, you know, aspects of the idea. But yeah, it's nice to see the platforms getting involved in that way as well and that, that provides a little bit of defensibility I think in a, in a healthy way. Not preventing competition but preventing just being ripped off.

B (15:23)

There's, there's another piece of this too which is like the AI stuff, it's not one sided. It's not just the copycats and the scammers and the fraudsters that benefit from AI. I mean there's the other side of that is using AI to defend yourself against that kind of stuff. So you can use AI to scan the App Store every day, look for copycat apps. I mean, you know, we've built stuff at Fabulous to do this. We look at the App Store every day. We're looking at stuff that's rising virally, we're scanning it, we're looking at the ads that they run. And so we have defense mechanisms for this. So it's not just one sided that, you know, the nefarious use case of AI always wins.

A (15:52)

The last thing I wanted to touch on was wallet share and willingness to pay as software gets easier and easier to produce. And it does seem like it's just going to continue to accelerate from here. Is this deflationary on the entire software ecosystem? You know, apps are cheaper and cheaper to build so developers can charge less and less for them. Do app prices go down as AI apps like ChatGPT and Claude and Gemini and others take wallet share? Are people going to pay less for the other apps? Like where do you see things going economically for apps?

B (16:31)

There's, there's two things here, right? So one is just, you know, I mean if you, if you kind of take a much longer, you know, sort of term view, I mean you could say, well there's like a lot of welfare effects from AI and it's going to drive the cost down in a lot of ways and it'll give people more free time. And so there's just more need to use more apps. But you've got fixed income. But what does discretionary income mean in the world dominated by AI? And. And that's your kind of thinking, like kind of very long term. I'm kind of. If I, if you kind of project out the next couple years, what I think happens is, you know, people have fixed discretionary income. They've only got so many apps they can support. Yeah, maybe you use price as a differentiator and you just race to the bottom. But what does that mean? It means ads. It means that's how you monetize. And so everything's an ad network on steroids. Right. So now you've got everything running ads well. Okay, well who's buying these ads? Well, all that companies that didn't exist before but can via the sort of miracle of AI, you know, launch a product and they've got to distribution, they've got to get eyeballs on their stuff. Right. And so they're the ones buying all these brand new ad units. Right. And so you've got this ads economy that's just turbocharged as a result of this, because you can't charge, because if you charge, your competitors undercut you and so then you'll get no users. Right. And so therefore the only way to make any money is to show ads and. But won't CPMs collapse if that's the case? No, because there's a bunch of buyers now because there's way more software that's trying to get eyeballs.

A (17:50)

It's going to be fascinating to see how all this plays out in the next few years. But I will say I think the current kind of AI doomerism that there will not be apps in a year, it is just not true. And I think it's very overhyped. As an app company today, you should be keeping a very close eye on this. And like you said, you know, running app store queries on a daily basis to look at defensibility, you should be leveraging AI to move faster yourself. You should be watching your back. You know, there's all these things you should be doing, but like freaking out and saying like there won't be software here, let me go start a farm, I think is very premature. I think those of us deep into the AI side of things on Twitter and that sort of thing are exposed to it in a different way than the rest of the world is and are a little ahead of our skis on some of these predictions.

B (18:39)

All these frameworks for building apps very quickly have existed for a really long time. Kotlin's existed for a long time, right? You know, Unity 3D for publishing games has existed for a long time. And I mean you never like fully took the bar down to zero. And even where you made it very, very easy, you invite the hobbyist class in who is just not really interested in trying to build a business out of it. So you'll see disruptive, but it's going to happen a lot slower than people think.

A (19:01)

That's a great way to sum it up. There will be disruptive change, but it's slower than the current estimates. So yeah, well, Eric, it was so much fun chatting through this with you. Anything you wanted to share with the audience as we wrap up? I know you've been blogging and podcasting up a storm over at Mobile Dev Memo.

B (19:16)

Yeah, no, not really. Nothing specific. But you can always find me at Mobile Dev Memo or on X.

A (19:21)

Awesome. Thanks so much Eric.

B (19:22)

Thank you.

A (19:25)

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