The Vibe-Coding Flood Hit Both App Stores. Most of It Lands in Silence

The flood, in numbers

Sensor Tower counted nearly 600,000 new apps on Apple's App Store in 2025, up 30% after eight years of decline, and 235,800 in the first quarter of 2026 alone, 84% more than a year earlier (9to5Mac). By the end of June the first-half total reached about 560,000, double the first half of 2025 — while App Store downloads grew just 2%, to 17.6 billion (9to5Mac).

200,000+App Store submissions a week, by Apple's account

The cause is no secret. Agentic coding tools such as Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex let people with no programming background describe an app and ship it. Sensor Tower's Abraham Yousef described "explosive growth of new apps over the past year", in step with tools that "remove prior difficulties of creating apps".

Apple says it still reviews 90% of submissions within 48 hours, at an average of 1.5 days, while handling more than 200,000 submissions a week, increasingly with AI tools assisting its reviewers. Developers reported waits of 7 to 30 days and more in March. Apple also drew a line: it blocked updates to Replit and Vibecode in mid-March and removed Anything on 30 March, citing guideline 2.5.2, which bars apps from downloading or executing code that changes their own features (The Next Web).

Google Play is flooding too

Almost all of the coverage has been about Apple. Appeye's own crawler, which has catalogued 536,365 App Store and 355,255 Google Play listings since August 2026, shows the same wave on Android — and a stronger one. Among the apps it has found, those released in the first half of 2026 number 62,325 on the App Store against 30,498 for the first half of 2025 (+104%), and 46,659 on Google Play against 20,697 (+125%).

Month by month the climb is steady. The crawler holds about 4,000 App Store apps per release month across 2024 and 5,000 to 6,500 through 2025; then 8,012 apps released in January 2026, 10,846 in March and 14,504 in July.

What people are building

Mostly not AI apps. Of the first-half 2026 App Store releases the crawler found, 10.6% mention AI in their name or description, barely above 9.6% a year earlier. Vibe coding changed how apps are built far more than what they do. The growth sits in everyday categories: Utilities (+160%), Photo & Video (+156%), Navigation (+155%), Finance (+147%), Lifestyle (+146%), Health & Fitness (+142%) and Productivity (+140%).

Those are the categories a weekend project can fill — a tracker, a converter, a timer, a budget sheet with a nicer face.

Most of the flood lands in silence

The decisive number is what happens after launch. 73.5% of the first-half 2026 App Store apps the crawler found have no rating at all, and only 1,563 of them (2.5%) have reached 100 ratings. On Google Play, 84.1% have no rating and 4,918 (10.5%) have 100 or more. The 2025 cohort has had a year longer to collect ratings, so the comparison is not like for like, but the scale is clear: on both stores the flood mostly lands in silence.

73.5%H1 2026 App Store releases with no rating yet

The ones that make it are not worse

Appeye publishes an app only once it has gathered 100 reviews with real text. 1,607 apps released in 2026 have cleared that bar. Their June-August negative review share is 21.5% — level with apps released in 2025 (21.6%) and below older apps (23.9%).

The Google Play star split agrees. Apps released in 2026 that made it into Appeye's catalogue hold 78.0% five-star and 7.6% one-star ratings across 1,370 apps; older apps hold 74.8% and 9.2% across 56,623.

What this means

For users, a new app with no reviews is now the norm, not a warning sign on its own — reviews are the filter. For developers, shipping is no longer the hard part; the first hundred reviews are. For both stores, the pressure lands in the review queue and in policy, and Google Play is taking the same volume with far less public reporting.

Shipping an app is no longer the hard part. Its first hundred reviews are.

How we measured

Release counts are apps live on the stores and found by Appeye's crawler between 3 August and 1 October 2026 through keyword, genre and chart discovery, grouped by each store's own release date. Apps removed before the crawl are not counted, which flatters recent months; Sensor Tower's full-store census confirms the App Store doubling. "Mentions AI" means "AI" or "A.I." as a word, "GPT" or "chatbot" in the name or description. Rating counts are as of the crawl. Negative review share covers June-August 2026 for apps in Appeye's published catalogue (100+ quality reviews), weighted by review count, measured on 8 October 2026.