People see this and think "AI is just generating a bunch of useless slop."

What they need to be thinking about is how much of our environment was destroyed to produce this useless slop.

Like, imagine all of those bullshit cheap plastic nic nacs that flood our oceans and landfills, times a million.

I remember when people came to me after they saw 'the social network' to pitch me their ideas. I'd be doing all the work but I'd get like 30% or something, because the had the idea, which in their minds was the only thing that counted. The ideas were usually 'facebook, but with '.

These kind of people can now finally make their own apps, and the result is exactly as shit as you'd expect. Even worse due to garbage AI code.

If its anything like the Play Store, the vast majority of these new slop apps are just shady copies of existing apps designed to milk their popularity for AD money, or worse ship malware onto your device.

Reminds me of those people claiming they're "10x more productive" and "doing the work of entire teams". With so much increased productivity, I would assume these results would be plainly visible through rapidly improving featureful applications, but instead we see declining quality in established software (e.g. windows 11) and a whole lot of garbage nobody wants to deal with like slop PR spam and these app releases.

Of all the trends in software development (and here, I use the term very loosely), shovelware certainly is one of them.

What it has spurned, as usual with tech, are talentless hacks trying to make easy money for nothing.

Step 1: Vibe code an app.

Step 2: It's buggy as shit.

Step 3: You have no idea how to fix it because you don't actually know what you're doing.

Step 4: Your app gets terrible reviews and nobody uses it.

Step 5: Release your next vibe-coded app, because failure doesn't mean anything anymore. If developing an app is free and easy, it doesn't matter if it's a failure since you really had nothing invested in the first place.

I'm going to say something extremely controversial on something that I, as a ex-writer, lost the battle against a long long time ago.

Vibe-coded apps are like self-published ebooks. If you are a crap writer, and your book doesn't sell, there's no consequence to it. If nobody buys it, or it gets bad reviews, you don't really need to care, because it's entirely free to just keep throwing your crap out there no matter how bad it might be. You can literally bang your firsts on a keyboard for a couple of hours, pay a few bucks to upload it to Amazon and call youreself Stephen fucking King. It doesn't matter if it doesn't sell because it literally cost you pennies.

A legitimate publisher would tell you to go fuck yourself, of course. But self-publishing is like flunking out of med school and decided to set up a portable operating table on the hospital sidewalk anyway because "How dare some gatekeeper tell you that you're not good enough."

Vibe-Coders are of the exact same ilk. Gatekeepers exist for a reason, in both publishing and app development. If your work is crap, the response is to GET BETTER, not say "Fuck it, I'm doing it anyway"

Sorry....rant over. I get a little passionate about this particular subject.

As someone that goes back to the early 90s in my career, and who lived through the whole dot com boom... My perspective remains unchanged from decades ago.

Without diminishing the skill it takes to make a quality app, the fundamental truth that I could never get across to people is that an idea, some underlying tech infrastructure and an app are the smallest part of making a business work. The business part is the hard part.

These tools have made it easier than ever for people to run off half cocked and make the same mistake that's been made for 4 decades. And they appeal to the worst sensibility, the incorrect assumption that if you build it they will come.

the absolute cratering of app reviews

Weird how reviews peaked and then dropped, would assume entire business are being build on fake ai reviews

As if we already didn't have a problem of bad app pollution and had to sieve through all the garbage to get to sth reasonable.

It's because they never found out about my calculator app, which was totally amazing, and not basic at all.

I like the latent reduction in "Apps with significant usage". I will assume it's due to the abandonment of apps after developer adoption of vibe code or AI as primary dev tool and subsequent reductions in performance, utility, or ergonomics. Or alternatively/additonally that good apps just get drowned in the slop noise.

A few weeks ago, I downloaded a puzzle app.

Upon opening it, it told me that, by the way, it does not collect any data. Also, here's a "Privacy Center" in the app to show me how they're not collecting data. Unsurprisingly, the privacy center did not display anything.

But what was worse, is that the puzzles were either far too easy or just entirely broken.
The pinnacle of ingenuity was when a puzzle asked me to compare four shapes and find the one which is mirrored, but then showed me symmetrical shapes.

Trying this app was entirely a waste of my time.
Which is kind of the fundamental problem I see here. There's so many apps for all kinds of purposes out there, it's just not useful to create Yet Another Calender App. It's a waste of time for me to try anything but the most popular app, or well, whatever is on F-Droid.
In theory, there can be hyper-specific niches that aren't covered by existing apps, but that's also damn near impossible to explain to potential users, so probably still don't end up with many users.

Where is the line tracking ‘shady bitcoin pump-n-dump/Chinese government investors’ in these slop apps aka Slapps™?

"Wanna develop an app?"

In hiking groups every f wit is now making a app for certain long walks.

Same thing could be done in a spreadsheet

No users. Pffft, we'll just make more AI users! That definitely won't kill the earth. /s

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