Rise of “small” apps: Non-developers write apps instead of buying them

It took Rebecca Yu seven days to program her dining app. I’m tired of the decision fatigue caused by people in a group chat not being able to decide where to eat.

Armed with determination, Claude and ChatGPT decided to do just that Simply create a dining app from scratch – Restaurant recommends restaurants to her and her friends based on their common interests.

“Once dynamic coding apps came around, I started hearing about people with no technical backgrounds having success creating their own apps,” she told TechCrunch. “When I had a week off before school started, I decided it was the perfect time to prepare my application.”

So, she created the Where2Eat web app to help her and her friends find a place to eat.

Yu is part of a growing trend of people who, due to rapid advances in AI technology, can easily create their own apps for personal use. Most of them program web applications, although they are also increasingly turning to programming mobile applications intended to run only on their phones and personal devices. Some already registered as Apple developers are leaving their personal apps in beta on TestFlight.

It’s a new era of app creation sometimes called applets, personal apps, or ephemeral apps because they are intended for use only by the creator (or the creator plus a few other people) and only for as long as the creator wants to keep the app. It is not intended for wide distribution or sale.

For example, founder Jordi Amat told TechCrunch that he created a casual web gaming app for his family to play during the holidays and simply closed it once the holiday was over.

Then there’s Shamillah Bankiya, a partner at Dawn Capital, who is building a web app to translate podcasts for personal use. Interestingly, Darryl Etherington, a former TechCrunch writer and now vice president of SBS Comms, is also building his own personal 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 a “vice tracker” for himself to see how many hookah and beverages he consumed each weekend.

Even professional developers code personal applications. Software engineer James Wu told TechCrunch that he built a web app planning tool to help with his cooking hobby.

Web and mobile applications

Since tools ranging from Claude Code to Lovable typically require not only strong programming knowledge to come up with a functional app, we’re seeing an early emergence of applets. Legend L. said: Berg, a computer science professor at Howard University, says these applications are highly context-specific, meet specialized needs, and then “disappear when the need is no longer there.”

“It’s similar to how trends emerge on social media and then fade away,” Berg III continued. “But now, (it’s) the same software.”

Yu said she now has six more ideas she wants to program. “It’s really exciting to be alive now,” she said.

In some ways, it has always been easier for someone without much programming experience to create cross-platform web applications without code e.g bubble and Adalo, which launched before LLM degrees became common. What’s new is the increased ability to create personal and temporary applications for mobile devices as well. Also new: the growing realization that anyone can program by simply describing the application they want in plain language.

Mobile applets are still not as easy to use as their web counterparts. This is because the standard way to download an app on iPhone is to download it from the App Store, which requires a paid Apple Developer account. But startups increasingly love coding the mobile atmosphere anything (any He grew up $11 million led by Footwork) and VibeCode (Who raised a $9.4 million seed round From Seven Seven Six last year) to help people build mobile apps.

Christina Melas Kiriazi, partner at Bain Capital Ventures, compared this era of app building to social media and Shopify, “where suddenly it became really easy to create content or build an online store, and then we saw an explosion in small sellers.” she said.

Good enough for one

However, applets also have problems. First, creating an app is still daunting for some. Yu, for example, said creating her own dining app wasn’t difficult; It was very time consuming. She had to rely on ChatGPT and Claude to help her understand some programming decisions. “Once I learned how to pose problems and solve them efficiently, construction became much easier,” she said.

Then there are the quality issues. Such personal applications may contain bugs or serious security flaws – and cannot be sold to the masses as is.

But there is still great potential in the era of building personal applications, especially as artificial intelligence, model inference, quality, and security become more sophisticated over time.

Software engineer Wu said he once designed an app for a friend who had heart palpitations. He built her a recording device that allowed her to record when she was having heart problems so she could show her doctor more easily. “A great example of a one-time personal program that helps you track something important,” he told TechCrunch.

Another founder, Nick Simpson, told TechCrunch that he was so bad at paying parking tickets — a result of the hard availability of parking in San Francisco — that he decided to create an app that would automatically pay them after the ticket was scanned. As a registered Apple developer, his app is in beta on TestFlight, but he said a group of his friends want it now too.

However, Berg3 believes that these types of applications could open up “exhilarating opportunities” for companies and creators to create “hyper-specific situational experiences.”

Etherington added to this, saying that he believes one day will dawn when people stop subscribing to apps that charge a monthly fee. Instead, they will just create their own apps for personal use.

Meanwhile, Milas Kyriazi expects to see ephemeral personal apps being used in the same way spreadsheets like Google Sheets or Excel were used.

“This will really bridge the gap between the spreadsheet and the full product,” she said.

Holly Krause, a media strategist, said she didn’t like the apps her doctor recommended, so she built an app herself that could help her track her allergies.

She had no technical experience and finished the web application in the same time it took her husband to go to dinner and back. They now have two web apps, designed in collaboration with Claude: one for allergies and allergies, and one for monitoring chores around the house, she said.

“I was like, ‘Wow, I hate Excel but I want to create an app for our family,'” Krause told TechCrunch. “So, I set it up and hosted it on Tiiny.host and deployed it to our mobile phones.”

She believes bioprogramming will bring “a lot of innovation and problem solving to communities that you wouldn’t have access to otherwise,” and hopes to beta test her allergy health app so she can one day release it to others.

“The app will aim to help others who are struggling to live their own lives, and for caregivers to also be able to access it,” she said. “I truly believe that passionate programming means I can help people.”