It took Rebecca Yu seven days to code her food app. He was tired of the decision fatigue that comes from people in a group chat who can’t decide where to eat.
Armed with determination, Claude and ChatGPT, Yu decided just build a food app from scratch — one that would recommend restaurants to her and her friends based on their shared interests.
“Once vibe coding apps came out, I started hearing about people with no tech background who were successfully building their own apps,” he told TechCrunch. “When I had a week off before school started, I decided it was the perfect time to finally create my application.”
So she created the web app Where2Eat to help her and her friends find a place to eat.
Yu is part of the growing trend of people who, due to rapid developments in AI technology, can easily create their own apps for personal use. Most are web coding apps, although they are also more and more vibe mobile coding apps meant to run only on their own personal phones and devices. Some who are already registered as Apple developers leave their personal apps in beta on TestFlight.
It’s a new era of app creation sometimes called applets, personal apps, or ephemeral apps because they’re meant to be used only by the creator (or the creator and some other people) and only for as long as the creator wants to keep the app. They are not intended for widespread distribution or sale.
For example, founder Jordi Amat told TechCrunch that he built a fleeting online gaming app for his family to play during the holidays and simply shut it down once the holidays were over.
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Then there’s Shamillah Bankiya, a partner at Dawn Capital, who is building a podcast translation web app for personal use. Interestingly enough, Darrell Etherington, former TechCrunch writer now VP at SBS Comms, is also building his own personal podcast translation app. “A lot of people I know use Claude Code, Replit, Bolt and Lovable to build apps for specific use cases,” he said.
One artist told TechCrunch that he made a “vice tracker” for himself to see how many hookahs and drinks he consumed each weekend.
Even professional developers code personal vibe apps. Software engineer James Waugh told TechCrunch that he built a web app design tool to help with his cooking hobby.
Web and mobile applications
Because tools ranging from Claude Code to Lovable usually don’t require strong coding knowledge just to get to a working app, we’re witnessing the early rise of applets. These are applications that are highly context-specific, fill niche needs, and then “go away when the need is no longer there,” said Legand L. Burge III, a professor of computer science at Howard University.
“It’s similar to how social media trends appear and then disappear,” Burge III continued. “But now, [it’s] the software itself.”
Yu said she now has six more ideas she wants to code. “It’s really exciting to be alive right now,” he said.
Somehow, it has always been easy for someone without much coding experience to build web apps through no-code platforms like Bubble and Adalo, which came out before LLMs became popular. What’s new is the growing ability to create personal, ad-hoc apps for mobile devices as well. Also new: the growing realization that anyone can code simply by describing, in plain language, the application they want.
Mobile apps are still not as easy as their web counterparts. That’s because the standard way to load an app onto an iPhone is to download it from the App Store, which requires a paid Apple developer account. But increasingly it likes startups coding vibe for mobile Anything (which lifted up $11 million, led by Footwork) and VibeCode (which raised a $9.4 million seed round from Seven Seven Six last year) emerged to help people build mobile apps.
Christina Mela-Kyriazi, a partner at Bain Capital Ventures, compared this era of app creation to social media and Shopify, “where all of a sudden it was very easy to create content or create an online store, and then we saw an explosion of small sellers.” she said.
Pretty good for one
However, applets also have problems. Generating and sharing code with others can become somewhat expensive given the subscriptions required, especially if all costs are related to a single application. Building an app also remains tedious for some. Yu, for example, said her food app wasn’t difficult to create. it was just too time consuming. She had to rely on ChatGPT and Claude to help her understand some coding decisions. “Once I learned how to prompt and problem-solve effectively, building became much easier,” he said.
Then there are quality issues. Such personal apps may have bugs or critical security flaws — they simply cannot be sold as is to the masses.
However, there is still significant potential in an era of personal app building, especially as AI and the model, quality, and security become more sophisticated over time.
A software engineer, Waugh said he once built an app for a friend who had palpitations. He made her a recorder that allowed her to record when she was having heart problems so she could more easily show her doctor. “Great example of a unique personal software that helps you keep track of something important,” he told TechCrunch.
Another founder, Nick Simpson, told TechCrunch that he was so bad at paying parking tickets — a consequence of San Francisco’s tight parking availability — that he decided to create an app that would automatically pay them after scanning the ticket. As a registered Apple developer, his app is in beta on TestFlight, but he said many of his friends now want it too.
However, Burge III believes these types of apps can open up “exciting opportunities” for businesses and creators to create “hyper-personalized status experiences.”
Etherington added to that, saying he believes a day is dawning when people stop signing up for apps that have monthly fees. Instead, they will simply create their own apps for personal use.
Melas-Kyriazi, meanwhile, expects to see the use of personal, fleeting apps in the same way that spreadsheets like Google Sheets or Excel were once used.
“It’s really going to bridge the gap between the spreadsheet and a finished product,” he said.
A media strategist, Hollie Krause, said she didn’t like the apps her doctor recommended, so she made one herself that can help her track her allergies.
She had no technical experience and completed the web application in the same time it took her husband to go to dinner and back. Now, she said, they have two web apps, both built with Claude: one for allergies and sensitivities, and one to track household chores.
“I was like ‘wow, I hate Excel, but I’d love to make an app for our household,'” Krause told TechCrunch. “So I launched it and hosted it on Tiiny.host and got it out on our phones.”
She believes vibe coding will bring “a lot of innovation and problem solving for communities that wouldn’t have access otherwise,” and hopes to test her allergy health app so she can one day roll it out to others.
“The app will be to help others who are struggling to navigate life for themselves and for carers to also be able to access,” he said. “I really think vibe coding means I can help people.”
