App Store chaos, without the gold

The App Store is being flooded like it hasn’t been in years. John Voorhees, reading Kalley Huang’s New York Times reporting, pulls the number that captures it: new app releases doubled to roughly 560,000 in the first half of this year alone — on pace to blow past the 2016 peak — while downloads crept up about 2%. Supply off the charts, demand flat. Agent-assisted coding has arrived, and the store is absorbing the shock.

We think Voorhees has the right read, because he holds two true things at once. The flood makes discoverability, already bad, worse — and it’s exactly this kind of disruption that shakes loose genuinely new apps (his own example, Open Minis, is one). Tools like Codex and Claude Code let people who’d never have shipped an app watch an idea become real. That’s worth celebrating and being clear-eyed about: most of those record numbers are mediocre, and the good ones are harder to find than ever.

The lesson we take, building toward our own first release, is that volume was never the moat. When anyone can generate a plausible app in an afternoon, the scarce things are taste, restraint, and a reason to trust the maker — the parts a model can’t vibe its way into. A crowded store doesn’t lower the bar for good software. It just makes the bar the only thing that matters.