/ Blog / / Blog /I swear to god… no matter where my attention wanders, the world around me seems hellbent on reminding me that the industry doesn’t value the craft of making software, all because of AI-assisted coding. Apparently, “everyone” is using LLMs to write and debug their apps. It’s big companies. It’s small companies. It’s individual people. I bet it’s absolutely obliterating careers.
Thankfully, my values are not tied to whatever the industry values. And since I value my own skill of making things, I’m going to keep doing that.
I have to tell you, I am seeing lots of trash lately. And part of it is clearly because more people can “make” an app than ever before. It’s crazy because I feel as if being an indie app developer has not been a very lucrative business for most. Yet the App Store “jackpot” dream is really alive, isn’t it?
Very few companies “win” on the App Store. It’s all the same companies who always win anyway. You can maybe make a living with your little app, but if developers can’t make that happen by coding an app by hand, how does anyone think vibe-coding has any chance at all? Especially if everyone else is trying to do exactly that. Why compete in the biggest space doing exactly what your competitors do?
How are we not just going to end up with a billion apps that do one thing slightly differently than the thousand other apps in the same space, just with a different tint color?
This ain’t it.
I think we’re in a design drought. I really do.
Over time, as Apple has provided design resources like UI templates and icons, software engineers have taken over more of the responsibility of designing apps. That would be great if that meant the overall design of apps has improved, but I think we can see that it has not.
People love to repeat what Steve Jobs once said, “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” And that’s true! Design is all three of these things: how it looks, how it feels, and how it works.
I dare say, however, that while we may have apps that work (admittedly, sometimes that’s arguable), most of them do not look or feel as great as they could.
I’ve noticed that lots of apps ship with what appears like the most stock, standard UI, only changing the tint color. This is not enough.
Apps should be beautiful. They should be much more beautiful than they are now. Don’t you think so? Years ago, when I worked at Apple, my official role was Visual Designer. Think about that for a minute. I think about it a lot. My job was primarily to make things look good. I would get a wireframe from a UI designer and turn that into something that users want to look at and interact with. (It was a cool job.)
Where is that now? I don’t see it that much. Where are the apps that you look at and think, “Damn, that looks nice”?
This is not about “skeuomorphism.” This is about style. It’s about injecting flavor and color, setting the tone in an app. Right now, to me, it just looks like 90% of all the apps out there are just wireframes that haven’t been painted yet.
Virtually every app is owned and directed by an engineer. (Before you jump in, I know there are exceptions. And I know some are marketing or business-driven.) But designers generally don’t own or direct the apps they work on. At best, they’re still ranked below the engineer who owns the product. It’s been this way for nearly 15–20 years. Before that, I think there were a lot more designer-and-engineer partnerships. I think that can still work if anyone wanted to give it a try, but it’s hard to convince engineers to split their earnings after it’s already been split with Apple.
Interesting to think about the possibility that Apple’s 30% cut might directly be responsible for eating into the design budget of indie apps. It’s something to chew on at least.
I think what we’re seeing is that not just engineers, not just designers, but lots of people from lots of interests and backgrounds are suddenly feeling capable of something they were previously unable to do. Maybe, they think, a one-person operation could actually be financially sustainable if they partner with AI (which is decidedly not a person). Maybe, they think, they don’t need to actually write all the code, or any of the code.
I don’t know how you feel, but so far the collective output from this experiment has me convinced that this approach is neither financially viable nor a mechanism for making good products. It’s just a lot of people pumping out apps that—generally speaking—no one but them wants to use, because the entire direction of each of these vibe-coded apps only ever seem to satisfy one person, the person who “made” it.
Everyone’s trying to go at this alone, and I think that’s why it’s not working or going to work.
May I then suggest an alternative, where we work together to build things? Partnering with another person to make an app doesn’t just mean that you have to split the profits, you get to split the responsibility and the expertise too.
So you’re not a designer. Don’t spin your wheels on design. Don’t make your best guess based on a loose understanding of platform guidance. Don’t try to pick colors if you don’t know what looks good.
If you can’t afford to hire a designer, try partnering with one instead. We should’t be building more apps. We should be building better apps. And we can do it if people stop trying to do it alone. If you see another person trying to build the same thing you are? They won’t have to be your competitor if you partner with them! Build the better app that either of you couldn’t build alone.
Build an app where you lean on each other to do the things each of you are good at, and you’ll outdo every vibe-coded app. The only reason we don’t know what that looks like is because nearly everyone gave up.