--- title: "There was no Copy button. I asked for one." description: "Apps on demand and my experience with early-access Wabi in 2025: from one interface for everyone to a version you can make your own." date: 2026-10-19 lang: en translationKey: "remixing-wabi" translationStatus: machine tags: ["AI", "interfaces", "authorship"] related: ["papper", "photo-tinder", "ai-on-a-tap"] sourceUrls: ["https://t.me/humanagentinteraction/96", "https://wabi.ai/"] canonical: "https://shipulin.md/en/blog/remixing-wabi/" --- ## Apps on demand Of all the ways GenAI could change our lives, I am particularly interested in creating personal apps. If you think about it, it is a little absurd that all of us, all over the world, use the same Google Maps. Some people commute every day; others hole up at home. One person drives, another doesn't. In some cities, you need to know the last stop and the line number; in others, the next station and the line's colour. Dozens, if not hundreds, of edge cases, and just one interface that is equally wrong for everyone.[^post] It is clear why things work this way when making an app takes a year of work by ten expensive specialists. But why should they stay that way when making an app means mumbling a voice message? Getting exactly what you need, in exactly the form that solves your problem, without the incessant droning about a subscription “for the small price of a cup of coffee”. In part, this challenges the paradigm that has taken shape over the past 10 years: our screen time is split between ten general-purpose apps owned by the same five megacorporations. I know several platforms that have taken on this problem. One, already available, is actually called Vibecode — the one with an orange square in its logo. Despite the high quality — Claude 4.5 under the hood — and the killer feature of being able to publish apps straight to the App Store, I struggle to believe in their model. It looks more like a way to flood the existing App Store with slop. A different approach comes from . I recommend reading their whole landing page: it has an interesting account of both the problems and how they intend to solve them. In short, they want to create a social app store: a place where people post apps to a feed like videos on TikTok, and where you can take any app — repost it — and remix it for your own needs. Found a great idea but don't like the design? One request, and you have a modified version. Wabi had not launched yet, but I wrote to the creators and asked for access to an early version. They agreed, so I opened it, started recording my screen and began using it. At first, I was disappointed because it hadn't actually generated my app. The developers said they were fixing it right then: the app had been built, but there were problems launching it. Then I tried other people's apps and had a go at remixing one. Despite all the growing pains of early access, I felt this was something that worked. I really liked that, simple as the mini-apps were, they were built around GenAI from the start: they could call LLMs, write text, generate images and recognise photographs. I found a mini-app that you could feed any photo, and it would write a prompt for generating something similar in the same style. I uploaded a selfie, got a prompt and discovered there was no Copy button! The prompt's formatting was pretty poor, too. I clicked “Remix”, typed that I wanted the prompt in JSON format with a way to copy it, and a couple of minutes later got my own version of the app with the missing features. Perhaps the real magic is in that feeling of co-creation. You know those TikTok videos that other people keep adding to until they become a scene with a completely different story, or an orchestra playing together? Except an app is more than something to watch and laugh at: it has a function. A prompt generator, for instance, is actually useful. Do I believe this is the final form this format will take? Probably not. Does it have the makings of a big future? Absolutely. Perhaps not here, not now, not in this particular setting, but I can easily imagine Telegram letting people build mini-apps on demand, or Google allowing something similar in the Play Store with Gemini 5. I'm sharing the video, with a few edits for privacy.[^recording] [^post]: [My first experience with Wabi, 2025](https://t.me/humanagentinteraction/96). I was an early user, not a member of the Wabi team. [^recording]: The recording attached to that post runs for 28:56. The failures and capabilities described belong to that session, rather than to [Wabi today](https://wabi.ai/).