How AI Will Change the Mobile Ecosystem
How mobile development will be next year
There are many mobile development platforms for non-technical users nowadays, like Rork and Lovable. They are not perfect now but will become much better in a year, just like how ChatGPT changed in the year after it was published, and like how much vibe coding agents have progressed in the last year.
These platforms can generate everything we need to submit to the App Store and Google Play Store, like app packages, screenshots, privacy policies, and descriptions. Maybe next year, everyone can build and publish one app in 3 hours. I don’t mean a professionally designed app like Photoshop or Figma, but it’s very possible for a standard music app or management app.
Z-Library & Copyright
Many users use Z-Library to download books rather than paying for them, but they reject it when someone wants to clone their app. What is the reason? I think it’s because we’re developers, and we make up the majority of voices on the internet. We take advantage of Z-Library, but we lose our advantage with an application copy. This means copying applications will become more like Z-Library if we ignore our attitude.
Moreover, how do we define copyright for an app? Unlike a book, it’s hard to identify whether an app violates copyright or not.
Based on the two arguments above, I think copying will happen more in the future; some users will choose the cheaper ones because of the price.
Media news
Another example is transferring from newspapers to UGC platforms. Nowadays, we obtain information from lots of websites other than official news media, like Hacker News, Twitter, and personal blogs. It takes zero cost. Oh, it’s not zero—we have to pay for cloud costs through advertisements. It’s not much, just like the cost to build a new app next year.
Nowadays, there is too much information generated by non-professional writers, and most users read information from them over professional news media. New media didn’t kill news, but made the ecosystem richer. It might be the same in the future for applications.
Better market: Games
We usually use apps to solve a problem; it’s different from reading books. We usually don’t want to explore new apps when we don’t have a demand. Books are more like games—we like to explore new games for fun. So, I think AI will have more influence on games, like other creativity fields.
Summary
AI will bring strong creativity to the app ecosystem. The costs will become lower for users, and the market will become more competitive for creators and the ecosystem will become richer for stores.