Vibe coders are a new problem for Apple and Google.
When an app takes a weekend to build, people give it away. That changes things for the stores.
Building an app used to take months and a team. Now one person with an AI agent can do it over a weekend. I know because that's how I build mine.
That shift is about to land on Apple and Google, in three ways.
The first is volume. More people can build apps, so more apps get submitted. Apple says App Review typically handles at least 50% of submissions in under 24 hours and 90% in under 48. That pace was set when an app took months to make. Building now takes a weekend. Review still takes people.
The second is money. When an app costs you a weekend, you don't care much about making money from it. You built it for yourself, and other people can use it too. That's what I did. The teleprompters I tried were all on subscriptions, so I built my own, ReadCam Prompter, and put it out for free. Apple asked for fixes once and approved it two days later.
Multiply that by thousands of people. Every free weekend app competes with a paid one. Developers who wrote everything by hand, and priced their work to match, start earning less.
The third is the stores themselves. Apple and Google make money on paid apps and subscriptions. A free app that replaces a paid one is commission they no longer collect, and it still has to go through review.
So they have a dilemma: keep approving everything, or stop backing apps that took a weekend to make. I'm sure they are already thinking about it.
For anyone building right now, the takeaway is simple. Building is no longer the hard part. Getting approved, getting found and keeping users is where the work is moving.