Tim, Don’t Kill My Vibe
It’s one thing for Apple’s AI product offerings to be non-competitive. Perhaps even worse is that as Apple stands still, software development is moving forward faster than ever before. Like it or not, LLMs—both through general chat interfaces and purpose-built developer tools—have meaningfully increased the rate at which new software can be produced. And they’ve done so both by making skilled developers more productive while also lowering the bar for less-experienced participants.
Barring a sharp correction, Apple looks increasingly likely to miss out on a generation of developers conditioned to first reach for tools like Cursor, Replit, or v0—especially as Apple’s own AI tooling remains notably absent. This goes well beyond enabling new entrants to “vibe code”—experienced mobile developers who, despite history with Xcode and a predilection for building native apps, are begrudgingly swapping out their tools in acknowledgement of the inarguable productivity benefits.
Sure, AI-assisted developer tools can be used to generate native iOS apps, but they’re not nearly as good at this as they are at generating e.g. React, whose developer experience advantage predates the LLM wave and has only since accelerated.
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App Review has always long been a major source of developer frustration. Authoritarian yet inconsistent policy enforcement aside, it’s simply too hard to distribute software even to your own Apple devices, let alone someone else’s. This isn’t new by any means, but as the time to build an app shrinks from weeks/months to hours/days, it feels more egregious—and thus like more of a liability—than ever before.
Basically, the threat to Apple the App Store poses is NOT regulators coming for it. That’s a distraction. The threat, as I’ve always tried to argue, perhaps unsuccessfully, is that market forces will work against it eventually. The App Store should have been making developers (mostly) happy all along, not mostly miserable.
And AI might be the disruption that brings about the “eventually”.
The speed with which I abandoned a decade of manicured Xcode project & window management muscle memory in favor of a mess of VS Code clones taught me something about myself and my work and what is important.
In normieland, where I still spend plenty of time both online and IRL, software’s newfound ability to write, draw, and speak like we humans is often taken as evidence that the machines are about to remake our entire society (again) and totally change the nature and value of labor (again). I don’t think the normies are wrong about this, but as flashy as Stable Diffusion and ChatGPT are, old heads know that the Robot Apocalypse has exactly one and only one horseman: computer programs that can write computer programs.
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If you were going to design a platform for the express purpose of teaching machines to code, it would probably be a cloud-hosted IDE plus execution environment that looks a lot like Replit. So while most of what you’ll read in this article and followups is applicable to all AI code generation tools more generally, I’ll be focusing on Replit’s toolset because right now it’s the richest and most advanced, and has the most potential for advancing the state-of-the-art.
Previously:
- Vibe Coding
- App Review, Never Change
- Rotten
- Whither Swift Assist?
- ChatGPT Now Integrates Directly With Xcode
- How to Use Cursor for iOS Development
- Our Changing Relationship With Apple
- GitHub Copilot for Xcode
- LLM Coding Tools in Xcode
- Apple Developer Relations
Update (2025-03-25): John Gruber (Mastodon):
17 years is a long time, though. And developers long ago stopped seeing the App Store as something that makes them happy, or that reduces friction and hassle from their lives. Instead they view it as a major source of friction and hassle. Apple should have focused on keeping the App Store as a thing that makes developers (mostly) happy all along, not (as things stand today) mostly miserable.
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Apple should move mountains to refocus itself on making the experience of developing for (and on) Apple platforms the best in the world, including distribution and monetization. Instead, they seem to be resting on the assumption that it’s a privilege, self-evident to all, just to be allowed to develop for Apple platforms.
See also: Bri and Hacker News.
1 Comment RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
> Apple looks increasingly likely to miss out on a generation of developers conditioned to first reach for tools like Cursor, Replit, or v0
Apple lost a generation of developers to the React and Electron menace while promoting Swift and SwiftUI platform lock-in. I have no hope Apple's take on AI-assisted coding will fare any better. But it's not a problem to them as long as they maintain a duopoly on Mobile.
> it’s simply too hard to distribute software even to your own Apple devices, let alone someone else’s
Apple's strategy is ecosystem lock-in and monetizing every transaction within that system. Apple is a tollbooth operator, not a tech company. Self-distribution removes their ability to pick winners and losers and wriggle dollars out of everyone involved, so they won't allow it.
Pulling out of ecosystems that work against you is better than pleas to execs. Minimize your Apple dependencies in your projects and their footprint in your mind.
