It took Rebecca Yu seven days to code the dining app Vibe. She was tired of the decision fatigue that comes from group chat participants not being able to decide where to eat.
Armed with Claude and ChatGPT’s determination, Yu decided to build a dining app from scratch. This app recommends restaurants to her and her friends based on common interests.
“Once the Vibe coding app came out, we started hearing stories of people with no technical background developing their own apps and having success,” she told TechCrunch. “I decided that when I had a week off before school started, it would be the perfect time to finalize my application.”
So she created the web app Where2Eat to help herself and her friends find places to eat.
Yu is part of a growing trend in which rapid advances in AI technology have made it easier for people to build their own apps for personal use. Mostly web application coding, but increasingly mobile app coding intended to run only on personal phones and devices. Some people who are already registered as Apple developers keep their personal apps in the beta version of TestFlight.
This is a new era in app creation, sometimes referred to as micro apps, personal apps, or ephemeral apps, because they are meant to be used only by the creator (or the creator and a select few others), and only for as long as the creator wants to keep the app. They are not intended for widespread distribution or sale.
For example, founder Jordi Amato told TechCrunch that he builds temporary web gaming apps for families to play while on vacation, then shuts them down once the holidays are over.
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Next up, Dawn Capital partner Shamilah Bankiya is building a personal podcast translation web app. Interestingly, former TechCrunch writer and current VP of SBS Comms Darrell Etherington is also building his own podcast translation app. “A lot of people I know use Claude Code, Replit, Bolt, and Lovable to build apps for specific use cases,” he said.
One artist told TechCrunch that he built his own “vice tracker” to track his hookah and drink intake every weekend.
Even professional developers code personal apps. Software engineer James Waugh told TechCrunch that he built the web app planning tool to help his cooking hobby.
web app and mobile
We’re witnessing the early rise of micro apps, as tools from Claude Code to Lovable typically don’t require robust coding knowledge just to create functional apps. These are highly context-specific apps that serve niche needs and “go away when the need goes away,” said Legando L. Burge III, a computer science professor at Howard University.
“It’s similar to how trends come and go on social media,” Burge III continued. “But now, (it’s) software itself.”
Yu said she has six more ideas she would like to code. “It’s really exciting to be alive right now,” she said.
In some ways, it’s always been easier for people without much coding experience to create web apps through no-code platforms like Bubble and Adalo, which were released before LLMs became popular. What’s new is also the enhanced ability to create personal temporary apps for mobile devices. Also new is the growing recognition that anyone can code the app they want by simply describing it in regular language.
Mobile micro-apps are not as easy as web micro-apps. That’s because the standard way to load apps on your iPhone is to download them from the App Store, which requires a paid Apple Developer account. But mobile vibe coding startups like Anything (raised $11 million led by Footwork) and VibeCode (raised a $9.4 million seed round from Seven Seven Six last year) are emerging to help people build mobile apps.
Christina Melas-Kyriazi, a partner at Bain Capital Ventures, compared this era of app building to social media and Shopify. “Suddenly it became so easy to create content and create a store online that there was an explosion of small sellers,” she said.
one is enough
Still, microapps also have their problems. First, building apps is still a pain for some people. For example, Yu said it’s not difficult to create a dining app. It took a long time. She had to rely on ChatGPT and Claude to understand her coding decisions. “Once I learned how to prompt and solve problems efficiently, it became much easier to build,” she said.
Then there’s the issue of quality. These personal apps may have bugs or serious security flaws, and cannot be sold to the public as is.
However, there is still great potential in the era of personal app building, especially as AI and model inference, quality, and security become more sophisticated over time.
Waugh, a software engineer, said he once created an app for a friend who had heart palpitations. He built a logger that could record when she had heart problems, making it easier for her to see a doctor. “It’s a great example of one-time personal software that helps you keep track of things that matter,” he told TechCrunch.
Another founder, Nick Simpson, told TechCrunch that he was so bad at paying parking tickets due to the tight parking situation in San Francisco that he decided to build an app that automatically pays after you scan your parking ticket. As a registered developer with Apple, his app is in beta on TestFlight, but he said that now many of his friends want it too.
Nevertheless, Burge III believes that these types of apps can open up “exhilarating opportunities” for businesses and creators to create “hyper-personalized, contextual experiences.”
Etherington also said he believes there will be a day when people will stop subscribing to apps that have monthly fees. Instead, you’ll just build your own apps for personal use.
Meanwhile, Melas-Kyriazi expects personal, ephemeral apps to be used in the same way that spreadsheets like Google Sheets and Excel were used in the past.
“This really bridges the gap between spreadsheets and full-fledged products,” she said.
Holly Kraus, a media strategist, said she developed her own app to help track allergies because she didn’t like the apps her doctor kept recommending.
Although she had no technical experience, she completed the web app in the same amount of time it took her husband to get home from dinner. They currently have two web apps, both built with Claude. One for allergies and sensitivities and one for monitoring chores around the house.
“I was like, ‘I hate Excel, but I want to make a home app,'” Krause told TechCrunch. “So I spun it up, hosted it on Tiiny.host, and popped it onto our phones.”
She believes Vibe Coding will bring “a lot of innovation and problem solving to communities that wouldn’t otherwise have access to it,” and hopes to beta test the allergy health app so she can one day release it to others.
“This app helps people who are struggling to live their lives on their own, and also makes it accessible to carers,” she said. “I really think vibe coding can help people.”
