The Personal App Revolution Has Hit a Speedbump
With the advent of AI, I thought we would get a personal app revolution. It has become ever easier to create an app that scratches a personal itch. The two apps(¹,²) I have released on Apple’s App Store are very much my interpretation of a personal itch. Both apps are in no way novel for the App Store. I think the biggest difference between my apps and their counterparts is that I can just keep them really simple and only match my needs. That does not mean they could not be useful for other users, but the starting point is personal.
I have experience with software development, but present-day AI would enable just about anybody to recreate their personal interpretation of an app. So I expect this to advance further and open up more niche apps.
For this week’s WWDC I was not expecting Apple to just open up everything to some vibecoded future, but I was interested to see in which direction they would take things.
On June 8, 2026, Apple updated its review guidelines and I think the change in 4.3(b) is sort of worrying.
From Apple’s App Review Guidelines 4.3:
(b) Don’t submit apps that are indistinguishable from what’s already widely available. Opportunistically creating variants of existing app categories or popular apps degrades App Store discovery, reduces overall app quality, and harms both users and developers. Certain kinds of apps, such as dating, flashlight, sound effects, wallpaper, simple timers, and fortune telling, are well established on the App Store and we will not accept new submissions unless they offer a meaningfully different or improved experience. We may remove these apps from the App Store going forward if they are not updated, improved, or do not attract customers. Other kinds of apps, such as drinking games, Kama Sutra, fart, and burp apps, are mediocre, low-quality, or low-effort and do not add value to the App Store. Repeated submissions of this kind may lead to removal from the Apple Developer Program.
I understand why this point is in the guidelines, but the following seems problematic for this personal app revolution:
[…] or do not attract customers.
Both my apps have no monetization strategy, therefore there is no money to spend on marketing. I don’t have a social media following to promote these apps and I do not have the skills or ambition to do anything about this. Until now this hasn’t felt like a problem. The apps are on the App Store, and if somebody discovers them and finds them useful, awesome. What matters most to me is that I get to use them on my phone. But am I now going to have to put money into the promotion of my apps just so they won’t be thrown off the App Store? My apps do not track users, have no advertising and do not require a subscription. But if I have to start spending money to stay on Apple’s platform, will I have to start doing these things? I understand that for Apple it would carry some really tiny advantage if I start putting in subscriptions and funneling back subscription revenue into marketing. But I really don’t want to do any of that.
You could suggest I just use TestFlight and be the only user of these apps. It would be simple to write a script that triggers a build on Xcode Cloud every three months, and I could keep using these apps this way. But that loses some of the magic of being able to share your app, to hear back from somebody who discovered it and liked it. So maybe another option would be to look into alternative app stores, but my feeling is that Apple also does not want developers to go in that direction.
Building your own app has this IKEA-like effect; it makes my phone feel more personal to me, similar to how some people decorate their phone or case with stickers. A widget from one of my apps is on my home screen and really makes it feel like my own. I think it would be awesome if more people got to do this and might even find traction before having to invest a lot into marketing dollars.
I hope AI opens up a world for people to scratch that personal itch. But my worry is that this new wording in 4.3(b) pushes things the other way. If staying on the App Store means attracting customers, then every app needs a business model. That will just create more apps designed to squeeze users into subscriptions or harvest their data.
P.S. Please do not suggest using Android, Google is the worst 🌭.