My perspective: I've been supporting and working with Mac and iOS developers since the last century, when Apple moved me from Chicago to be an evangelist at Apple HQ in Cupertino. I know as much as anyone about AI-assisted app development, as the creator/maintainer of the free/open source Axiom (https://charleswiltgen.github.io/Axiom/) for iOS/macOS devs.
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.
I don't think i fear so much for competing on quality vs a vibe coder, I think two orders of magnitude is underselling the potential snowball effect of a vibe coder attempting to craft up a semi complex project. The sooner they start to pile on complexity, the quicker it is that the 2x gap widens.
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.
Admittedly, I’ve gone through waves of feeling scared for the future of software engineering. I manage many people so I care about them and their futures. But the more I use AI in writing software, not just vibe coding, the more I align with this perspective. And the way I see it, when AGI does come it’s going to affect a whole lot more than the software engineering job market. That’s global societal-level impact type stuff. We’d have to reckon with if work (meaning a 9 to 5) is truly a requirement to thrive in life. Spoiler, it isn’t.
I don't know? It's an agent, an automated contractor, a black box that produces work. When you pay someone to help write your app, you don't call that an "abstraction."
I had a go at building both a Mac and iOS dictation app the other day (dictator.robgough.net) thinking that with Claude's input, this probably wouldn't work... but it was a real problem I had, and I wanted to see how far we could get. Best way to learn the tools, right? I'd already spent the day playing with alternative apps that didn't quite do what I wanted.
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.
That looks great! It's so clearly going to be the dominant way of working with your computer. I was such a cynic, so I was completely shocked at how quickly it became my favourite way to interact with my devices.
I'm fully expecting to be completely sherlocked during Apple's WWDC event in the coming weeks. In fact, I'm hoping we will be. However, I fear that they might not be quite ready for that yet. This functionality really should sit at the top OS level, equal to Keyboard/Mouse/Trackpad etc.
You need to have an Apple developer account. Then you need to submit your app to Apple for review. Then you need to comply with a list of sometimes arbitrary corrections/requirements that they send back (there is a document that specifies what you need to do, but it is not uniformly enforced in my experience). Then, eventually, you can list your app on the app store.
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)
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!
Do you want to release it to the general public or just a circle of friends and family? TestFlight lets you have up to a hundred users forever without ever truly releasing. I have a couple of home-relevant apps I am managing that way.
I think that's a fair question. For this app I didn't see the harm in releasing it. You have to pay for the account etc. to get it onto TestFlight anyway, so I might as well just put it out there. And avoids me having to resubmit every 90 days. There also wasn't a lot of custom "me" stuff in this one, but I could see going that route for other apps in the future.
I mean, in general I dislike some of the more extreme app store gating.. but if apps are getting vibe coded with little effort I think gatekeeping is more important than ever. I think "is the author willing to put in the work to pass review" might be a useful heuristic, and it could also prevent things like vulnerable software being published. Plus it amuses me to imagine big tech having to deal with the slop apocalypse they've created!
Review times have already spiked, apparently, although I've never found them particularly good. There used to be a third-party website that tracked this via user submissions, though that was shut down when they made genuine efforts to improve timings several years ago as it was deemed no longer neccesary.
I think it's a fair criticism that there will be a lot of people putting "lower-quality" apps on there. I do think Claude did a better job of this than I would have managed. It certainly seems to work well enough.
I do believe Apple will have to rethink exactly what they want to gatekeep and why. If nothing else, in the context of allowing people to get more out of their powerful devices. For example, I wish my iPad Pro could actually do more useful things with it's M4 processor. Hopefully that's something the new CEO has on his list.
I suspect AI is going to result in the bottom falling out of the market for simple apps.
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.
Will the complex apps be discoverable though, and if not, will the devs bother at all? I feel like this would be a win for old-school open source, where people would do it for the love of the aim, and better vetted app stores like F-Droid might win out
Surprisingly I'm seeing a rapid increase of discoverability for my apps FROM LLMs. The flood of Claude/ChatGPT users finding my apps right after I get a basic site up, before I've told anyone it exists, is astonishing.
If you are solving a problem users are searching for, you will be found and found faster than ever via LLMs.
I've been dipping my toes back in after nearly 10 years away from native development.
I finally just got an Android app shipped to the Play Store for https://wordtrak.com, after several weeks of back and forth with what I am assuming are mostly robots managing the Google side of this. I was stunned to see how far Android distribution has come (and especially that all changes are now reviewed).
What I was most surprised by though, was all of the ridiculous red tape around the actual process of getting an app listed. Best example: I had to confirm I didn't change the outcome of the Korean War in order to list on Play Store in Korea.
In any case I got most of this done with Claude and expo.dev - it was a huge relief to let Claude Code churn through this and not have to worry about spending months re-learning frameworks and ecosystems.
> What is going on in the world of pure IOS/Android app development?
I'll speak only for Android.
I am tired of Google breaking source compatibility with every AndroidX release and remaining on outdated IntelliJ Platform versions in Android Studio.
not too long ago, Google released AGP 9.0, which was a SHOCKWAVE for many Android projects. many compiler plugins' compatibility, including Google's own Protobuf Gradle plugin, took very long to adapt. also, Kotlin Multiplatform received so much damage that a month after release, JetBrains themselves released an AGP 9.0 migration video on YouTube.
and then we have MDC-Android (Views) v. Compose tension. MDC-Android got Material 3 and M3 Expressive components much faster than Compose, and for many you still have to be on alpha Compose Material3 releases... which are more stable than "Stable," somehow. Compose is nice, but I'd swap Material for something else ASAP or use Compose Foundation directly.
> How is AI/LLMs affecting app development?
you have more useless buttons in Android Studio. or, if you are a paying IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate user, you can have Android support in IDEA, which enables ACP agents without sacrificing proper Android support. IDEA Android plugin lags behind AGP upgrades a little, though, but it's fine.
oh, and, you can vibecode Android apps in Google AI Studio with streaming from a Google-hosted device, all without Android Studio.
> what has changed in App Development in the past 2-5 years?
2 years? a lot. 5 years? the world turned upside down! Compose got Stable release 4 years ago.
> What does a career in only app development look like nowadays?
very discouraging. everyone just prefers React "Native". I couldn't find an Android job in two years because it's nowhere to apply to in Ukraine and just recently switched to .NET. guess what? less than a few weeks passed after I updated my Djinni and now I have a few interviews on the next week.
So a bit different from the other comments. We're a wearable company which of course pairs with an app.
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.
> and the bluetooth libraries across different devices (particularly in Android land) has me concerned.
I work on the Android side for a company that develops an external bluetooth device (not a wearable, but similar enough) and the bluetooth library situation has certainly been an issue to be concerned about.
Using the default Android bluetooth SDK "raw" is fraught with potential problems, at the very least you need some sort of added message-queue-like system built on top since it does none of this for you. You also have to contend with a lot of strange device specific issues (of the type "works fine on 99% of Android devices, this one Samsung device has a driver quirk we need to work around", etc).
Things looked pretty good with the Jetpack androidx.bluetooth library as a higher level abstraction, but Google suddenly deprecated it and stopped working on it before it left alpha.
After lots of investigations and iterations I ended up using Nordic Semiconductor's 2.0 Kotlin BLE Library, which is technically also still in alpha release, but is much more stable than that designation suggests.
After having messed with all of the options, I highly recommend Nordic's library as a solid basis for using Bluetooth in modern Android/Kotlin, but in your specific situation I'm not sure if bridging it to Rust would be less or more painful than having an LLM generate a Rust wrapper and message queue system over the raw android.bluetooth library.
why was your team against react native? (for mobile app right that goes along with the wearable right?)
you can ship the actual UI stuff in seconds.
you can write your own plugins for anything native and just call it. we have a app that uses many native SDK calls which we write plugins for and call.
not to mention that once the native work is done you can deploy ui level changes and new features, bug fixes to users over OTA.
i’m just an outsider so i know my lane. but
whatever you do, do not allow bike shedding and ultra opinionated tech nerds to derail company vision timelines.
From the perspective of this intermediate/hobbyist level Python amateur who never quite got to grips with Swift, it's a paradigm shift. For all manner of simple-ish personal apps, Claude can one-shot an MVP in a few minutes, pulling all of the Swift/UI boilerplate together (which would have taken me hours if not days via tutorials) which I can then easily tweak and iterate to my heart's content.
It also supports the 'native is better' apprpach. For example, I recently started with Powerflow [0] which I really like except for the size of it, and created a Swift version [1] in an hour of Claude plus manual tweaks. It's been running quietly on my laptop ever since.
The downside is that it brings Apple's iOS restrictions into sharper relief: being able to easily write widgets and apps to suit my needs but then being unable to run then for longer than a week on my own hardware without paying $99 a year is especially frustrating.
I am building an app that is for a niche market, and I wouldn't have started without LLMs.
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.
As an Android developer, KMP is the bigger development. It seems mature enough now that if I want to build an app as a single dev I feel confident that I could get the iOS version out at the same time. They seem to be avoiding the mistakes of Xamarin and Flutter
I just do iOS development and my opinion is this: Start with XCode then use an LLM to design and develop it out from there its great. The newer models work great with project files where they used to struggle. Using the Visual Code development tools alongside XCode, claude skills and 3rd party libraries and frameworks with SwiftUI and Swift 5/6 is really convincing me I should make apps full time again. Coding apps has become my dream job.
AI has made it much easier to build an app, but distribution hasn't gotten any easier. Getting through App Store review, acquiring users, and retaining them still feels like 90% of the battle.
I don't install apps unless it's for an event or something. I just make my own to fit my needs. I can get a functional pwa out in about a day or two now.
A good analogy (I think) is photography. Everyone has a camera, but only a fraction of human beings with a camera are professional photographers. AI is to App Development, what the smartphone is to Photography. Anyone can do it, yet paradoxically, only a few people really "do".
Software engineering is flattening. I wouldn't go into 'pure' app development but specialize in a regulated field, unless I had entrepreneurship aspirations, in which case now is a great time to enter the field.
For the past 12 years I've been mostly developing for Android professionally (minus a brief 1 year stint writing code for a system based on Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3).
Other than LLMs the biggest change has been moving to Kotlin Compose from the old Android XML-based layout system.
LLMs are something I use often now and I'm not thrilled about this but it is what it is. I'm one of those people who prefer to hand craft code in a deep flow state so the move to LLMs has made me enjoy my job less, but it is hard to argue against the productivity gains so I try to be grateful that there was a long period where what I enjoyed doing and getting paid for were so well aligned. It isn't like my job is horrible now, it is just not quite as fun.
While I use agentic AI quite a bit, I don't "vibe code". Much of the software I currently write falls under various medical compliance systems (FDA, EMA, etc) and they rightfully expect us to understand and be personally responsible for the quality of the code we produce. Even absent the regulations, I still find it absolutely wild people ship code (associated with their name in any way) without looking at it.
I've been working for the same company for the past 5 years so I have little idea of how the career/interview side of things have changed recently. From anecdotal reports it seems like a giant mess of ghost jobs and competing with massive piles of AI-generated and AI-filtered resumes these days unless you have a strong network from the before times.
A lot of people in this thread seem to be worried about discoverability, I'm sure AI has made that worse but it was already a huge problem to get random apps noticed even before AI. The apps I currently work on professionally support external hardware devices that the apps control via bluetooth, so app store discoverability isn't a big concern (you buy the external device, then the documentation points you to the app store downloads).
I have also done app development as a non-commercial side project, writing a PvP game/stat tracking app for the game Destiny 2, this is a free app that has about a thousand users on iOS and a few hundred on Android, written in Kotlin Multiplatform. That started pre-LLM and I've continued to avoid using LLMs while working on it to make sure I can remember how to code sans LLMs, though the fact that Destiny 2 is stopping new development as of June 9th means I'm unlikely to put much effort into it going forward.
AI Coding is great helper but not a substitutue for producing decent looking 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.
My perspective: I've been supporting and working with Mac and iOS developers since the last century, when Apple moved me from Chicago to be an evangelist at Apple HQ in Cupertino. I know as much as anyone about AI-assisted app development, as the creator/maintainer of the free/open source Axiom (https://charleswiltgen.github.io/Axiom/) for iOS/macOS devs.
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.
I don't think i fear so much for competing on quality vs a vibe coder, I think two orders of magnitude is underselling the potential snowball effect of a vibe coder attempting to craft up a semi complex project. The sooner they start to pile on complexity, the quicker it is that the 2x gap widens.
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.
O r d E R s O f m a g N I T U D E
THEY SAID THE THING!
Just another layer of Sturgeon's Law?
- 90% of everything is vibe-coded crap
- 90% of what isn't vibe-coded crap is also crap
ergo, the small percentage which is left is not crap.
Admittedly, I’ve gone through waves of feeling scared for the future of software engineering. I manage many people so I care about them and their futures. But the more I use AI in writing software, not just vibe coding, the more I align with this perspective. And the way I see it, when AGI does come it’s going to affect a whole lot more than the software engineering job market. That’s global societal-level impact type stuff. We’d have to reckon with if work (meaning a 9 to 5) is truly a requirement to thrive in life. Spoiler, it isn’t.
It will create more inequality. Not in the way that you think.
The best will always be the best. But the upper average and average and below will become all one and the same.
And that’s kinda how society should be really. Equal opportunity. Not equal outcome.
AI is not an abstraction. I still can’t believe engineers are making this basic, definitional mistake.
If not an abstraction, how would you describe it then?
I don't know? It's an agent, an automated contractor, a black box that produces work. When you pay someone to help write your app, you don't call that an "abstraction."
AI isn’t someone. And sure instead of building X I can of course bring in Y that abstracts away X.
I had a go at building both a Mac and iOS dictation app the other day (dictator.robgough.net) thinking that with Claude's input, this probably wouldn't work... but it was a real problem I had, and I wanted to see how far we could get. Best way to learn the tools, right? I'd already spent the day playing with alternative apps that didn't quite do what I wanted.
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.
Looks nice. Funny, I also made a dictation app using claude ... yet just for iOS. https://kaikunze.de/aimemo/
That looks great! It's so clearly going to be the dominant way of working with your computer. I was such a cynic, so I was completely shocked at how quickly it became my favourite way to interact with my devices.
I'm fully expecting to be completely sherlocked during Apple's WWDC event in the coming weeks. In fact, I'm hoping we will be. However, I fear that they might not be quite ready for that yet. This functionality really should sit at the top OS level, equal to Keyboard/Mouse/Trackpad etc.
could you talk more about the hoops? i’m getting close to the point i’d like to release something and it’d be my first time.
You need to have an Apple developer account. Then you need to submit your app to Apple for review. Then you need to comply with a list of sometimes arbitrary corrections/requirements that they send back (there is a document that specifies what you need to do, but it is not uniformly enforced in my experience). Then, eventually, you can list your app on the app store.
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)
Exactly this.
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!
Do you want to release it to the general public or just a circle of friends and family? TestFlight lets you have up to a hundred users forever without ever truly releasing. I have a couple of home-relevant apps I am managing that way.
I think that's a fair question. For this app I didn't see the harm in releasing it. You have to pay for the account etc. to get it onto TestFlight anyway, so I might as well just put it out there. And avoids me having to resubmit every 90 days. There also wasn't a lot of custom "me" stuff in this one, but I could see going that route for other apps in the future.
Not just native apps.
There will be consolidation all over the place. Expect government services to take over and control things that were once private.
I mean, in general I dislike some of the more extreme app store gating.. but if apps are getting vibe coded with little effort I think gatekeeping is more important than ever. I think "is the author willing to put in the work to pass review" might be a useful heuristic, and it could also prevent things like vulnerable software being published. Plus it amuses me to imagine big tech having to deal with the slop apocalypse they've created!
Review times have already spiked, apparently, although I've never found them particularly good. There used to be a third-party website that tracked this via user submissions, though that was shut down when they made genuine efforts to improve timings several years ago as it was deemed no longer neccesary.
I think it's a fair criticism that there will be a lot of people putting "lower-quality" apps on there. I do think Claude did a better job of this than I would have managed. It certainly seems to work well enough.
I do believe Apple will have to rethink exactly what they want to gatekeep and why. If nothing else, in the context of allowing people to get more out of their powerful devices. For example, I wish my iPad Pro could actually do more useful things with it's M4 processor. Hopefully that's something the new CEO has on his list.
I suspect AI is going to result in the bottom falling out of the market for simple apps.
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.
Will the complex apps be discoverable though, and if not, will the devs bother at all? I feel like this would be a win for old-school open source, where people would do it for the love of the aim, and better vetted app stores like F-Droid might win out
Surprisingly I'm seeing a rapid increase of discoverability for my apps FROM LLMs. The flood of Claude/ChatGPT users finding my apps right after I get a basic site up, before I've told anyone it exists, is astonishing.
If you are solving a problem users are searching for, you will be found and found faster than ever via LLMs.
Is that a new problem though? I thought the App Store had been dead for discovery for a long time.
>Will the complex apps be discoverable though
That is the real issue. How to get noticed in a sea of slop.
I've been dipping my toes back in after nearly 10 years away from native development.
I finally just got an Android app shipped to the Play Store for https://wordtrak.com, after several weeks of back and forth with what I am assuming are mostly robots managing the Google side of this. I was stunned to see how far Android distribution has come (and especially that all changes are now reviewed).
What I was most surprised by though, was all of the ridiculous red tape around the actual process of getting an app listed. Best example: I had to confirm I didn't change the outcome of the Korean War in order to list on Play Store in Korea.
In any case I got most of this done with Claude and expo.dev - it was a huge relief to let Claude Code churn through this and not have to worry about spending months re-learning frameworks and ecosystems.
Android native dev here.
> What is going on in the world of pure IOS/Android app development?
I'll speak only for Android.
I am tired of Google breaking source compatibility with every AndroidX release and remaining on outdated IntelliJ Platform versions in Android Studio.
not too long ago, Google released AGP 9.0, which was a SHOCKWAVE for many Android projects. many compiler plugins' compatibility, including Google's own Protobuf Gradle plugin, took very long to adapt. also, Kotlin Multiplatform received so much damage that a month after release, JetBrains themselves released an AGP 9.0 migration video on YouTube.
and then we have MDC-Android (Views) v. Compose tension. MDC-Android got Material 3 and M3 Expressive components much faster than Compose, and for many you still have to be on alpha Compose Material3 releases... which are more stable than "Stable," somehow. Compose is nice, but I'd swap Material for something else ASAP or use Compose Foundation directly.
> How is AI/LLMs affecting app development?
you have more useless buttons in Android Studio. or, if you are a paying IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate user, you can have Android support in IDEA, which enables ACP agents without sacrificing proper Android support. IDEA Android plugin lags behind AGP upgrades a little, though, but it's fine.
oh, and, you can vibecode Android apps in Google AI Studio with streaming from a Google-hosted device, all without Android Studio.
> what has changed in App Development in the past 2-5 years?
2 years? a lot. 5 years? the world turned upside down! Compose got Stable release 4 years ago.
> What does a career in only app development look like nowadays?
very discouraging. everyone just prefers React "Native". I couldn't find an Android job in two years because it's nowhere to apply to in Ukraine and just recently switched to .NET. guess what? less than a few weeks passed after I updated my Djinni and now I have a few interviews on the next week.
So a bit different from the other comments. We're a wearable company which of course pairs with an app.
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.
> We built our logic in Rust, so that compiles cross platform. It's really just the UI layer that is per platform.
Having never created a mobile app, how's that work exactly?
FFI. For example in Flutter, there are packages like flutter_rust_bridge that allow you to write Rust that then interacts with the host OS.
Check out tauri.
Tauri is not even remotely an appropriate answer to this question.
> and the bluetooth libraries across different devices (particularly in Android land) has me concerned.
I work on the Android side for a company that develops an external bluetooth device (not a wearable, but similar enough) and the bluetooth library situation has certainly been an issue to be concerned about.
Using the default Android bluetooth SDK "raw" is fraught with potential problems, at the very least you need some sort of added message-queue-like system built on top since it does none of this for you. You also have to contend with a lot of strange device specific issues (of the type "works fine on 99% of Android devices, this one Samsung device has a driver quirk we need to work around", etc).
Things looked pretty good with the Jetpack androidx.bluetooth library as a higher level abstraction, but Google suddenly deprecated it and stopped working on it before it left alpha.
After lots of investigations and iterations I ended up using Nordic Semiconductor's 2.0 Kotlin BLE Library, which is technically also still in alpha release, but is much more stable than that designation suggests.
https://github.com/nordicsemi/Kotlin-BLE-Library
After having messed with all of the options, I highly recommend Nordic's library as a solid basis for using Bluetooth in modern Android/Kotlin, but in your specific situation I'm not sure if bridging it to Rust would be less or more painful than having an LLM generate a Rust wrapper and message queue system over the raw android.bluetooth library.
why was your team against react native? (for mobile app right that goes along with the wearable right?)
you can ship the actual UI stuff in seconds.
you can write your own plugins for anything native and just call it. we have a app that uses many native SDK calls which we write plugins for and call.
not to mention that once the native work is done you can deploy ui level changes and new features, bug fixes to users over OTA.
i’m just an outsider so i know my lane. but
whatever you do, do not allow bike shedding and ultra opinionated tech nerds to derail company vision timelines.
From the perspective of this intermediate/hobbyist level Python amateur who never quite got to grips with Swift, it's a paradigm shift. For all manner of simple-ish personal apps, Claude can one-shot an MVP in a few minutes, pulling all of the Swift/UI boilerplate together (which would have taken me hours if not days via tutorials) which I can then easily tweak and iterate to my heart's content.
It also supports the 'native is better' apprpach. For example, I recently started with Powerflow [0] which I really like except for the size of it, and created a Swift version [1] in an hour of Claude plus manual tweaks. It's been running quietly on my laptop ever since.
The downside is that it brings Apple's iOS restrictions into sharper relief: being able to easily write widgets and apps to suit my needs but then being unable to run then for longer than a week on my own hardware without paying $99 a year is especially frustrating.
[0] https://github.com/lzt1008/powerflow [1] https://github.com/Tom1827/powerflow-swift
I am building an app that is for a niche market, and I wouldn't have started without LLMs.
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.
It is bad. Layoffs everywhere. Google is becoming apple. Companies want you to do the job of 6 engineers using ai.
The market is saturated for new apps.
I’ll be curious to see how many new vibe coded apps make it to a 2.0
LLMs so far have just been another tool to use.
As an Android developer, KMP is the bigger development. It seems mature enough now that if I want to build an app as a single dev I feel confident that I could get the iOS version out at the same time. They seem to be avoiding the mistakes of Xamarin and Flutter
What are the mistakes in your mind? And isn't Compose Multiplatform basically Flutter?
I just do iOS development and my opinion is this: Start with XCode then use an LLM to design and develop it out from there its great. The newer models work great with project files where they used to struggle. Using the Visual Code development tools alongside XCode, claude skills and 3rd party libraries and frameworks with SwiftUI and Swift 5/6 is really convincing me I should make apps full time again. Coding apps has become my dream job.
https://github.com/LeoMobileDeveloper/ios-developer-tools
https://github.com/AvdLee/SwiftUI-Agent-Skill
AI has made it much easier to build an app, but distribution hasn't gotten any easier. Getting through App Store review, acquiring users, and retaining them still feels like 90% of the battle.
I'm have a game on both app stores, built in .net Maui. It earns enough to keep a roof over my head.
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.
https://github.com/dotnet/maui/wiki/Using-AI-to-Work-on-.NET...
Indeed, I have tried this route, but for anything more than a really simple app it's just not effective enough.
I don't install apps unless it's for an event or something. I just make my own to fit my needs. I can get a functional pwa out in about a day or two now.
What do you use for hosting the PWAs?
I’ve been thinking about this—if I wanted to learn iOS dev where should I start? (Book preferred.)
Mostly for fun/scratch my own itch, and using AI as a companion/helper device.
It's incredibly easy to make apps nowadays, it's all about distribution (usually on social media).
A good analogy (I think) is photography. Everyone has a camera, but only a fraction of human beings with a camera are professional photographers. AI is to App Development, what the smartphone is to Photography. Anyone can do it, yet paradoxically, only a few people really "do".
idea ->claude ->public
Software engineering is flattening. I wouldn't go into 'pure' app development but specialize in a regulated field, unless I had entrepreneurship aspirations, in which case now is a great time to enter the field.
For the past 12 years I've been mostly developing for Android professionally (minus a brief 1 year stint writing code for a system based on Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3).
Other than LLMs the biggest change has been moving to Kotlin Compose from the old Android XML-based layout system.
LLMs are something I use often now and I'm not thrilled about this but it is what it is. I'm one of those people who prefer to hand craft code in a deep flow state so the move to LLMs has made me enjoy my job less, but it is hard to argue against the productivity gains so I try to be grateful that there was a long period where what I enjoyed doing and getting paid for were so well aligned. It isn't like my job is horrible now, it is just not quite as fun.
While I use agentic AI quite a bit, I don't "vibe code". Much of the software I currently write falls under various medical compliance systems (FDA, EMA, etc) and they rightfully expect us to understand and be personally responsible for the quality of the code we produce. Even absent the regulations, I still find it absolutely wild people ship code (associated with their name in any way) without looking at it.
I've been working for the same company for the past 5 years so I have little idea of how the career/interview side of things have changed recently. From anecdotal reports it seems like a giant mess of ghost jobs and competing with massive piles of AI-generated and AI-filtered resumes these days unless you have a strong network from the before times.
A lot of people in this thread seem to be worried about discoverability, I'm sure AI has made that worse but it was already a huge problem to get random apps noticed even before AI. The apps I currently work on professionally support external hardware devices that the apps control via bluetooth, so app store discoverability isn't a big concern (you buy the external device, then the documentation points you to the app store downloads).
I have also done app development as a non-commercial side project, writing a PvP game/stat tracking app for the game Destiny 2, this is a free app that has about a thousand users on iOS and a few hundred on Android, written in Kotlin Multiplatform. That started pre-LLM and I've continued to avoid using LLMs while working on it to make sure I can remember how to code sans LLMs, though the fact that Destiny 2 is stopping new development as of June 9th means I'm unlikely to put much effort into it going forward.
AI Coding is great helper but not a substitutue for producing decent looking 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.