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.1
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 https://wabi.ai/. 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.2
Footnotes
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My first experience with Wabi, 2025. I was an early user, not a member of the Wabi team. ↩
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The recording attached to that post runs for 28:56. The failures and capabilities described belong to that session, rather than to Wabi today. ↩