Pitching Apps in the AI Era
So I was quite surprised earlier this year when I started to receive personalized pitches from indie developers, a few at first, and now several per week. Many seem to be building apps with AI assistance, but more to the point, they seem to be getting AI help with promoting the apps as well. They often reference our still-current prohibition on press releases with a nominally personal email, but for someone as steeped in words as I am, it’s obvious that an AI is doing the writing.
[…]
At first, this reliance on AI rubbed me the wrong way. But then I realized that it wasn’t really any different than a software company outsourcing its media relations to a PR firm. Those communications had a certain form and set of expectations, and while these new AI-generated messages have a different form, the expectations (coverage) are pretty much the same. AI is simply the new PR agency. Which undoubtedly dismays PR professionals, but there’s still room for those doing PR right.
The problem I have with these new pitches isn’t that the developers used AI to generate them; it’s that they often don’t do it very well.
I’ve noticed a huge increase this year in people pitching me their apps. Many of them seem to have been coded with the assistance of AI. For some app categories, this worries me, and there also seems to be less care taken in following Mac platform conventions. But it’s also exciting to see such a flurry of development, both totally new ideas and fresh takes on old niches. I have a large backlog that I’d like to write about. (There are also many almost indistinguishable variations in certain categories.)
Separately, as Engst says, many of the pitches (and sometimes even the sites) are obviously written by AI. This rubs me the wrong way. I don’t mind at all receiving a generic press release or even a one-liner with a link. But these lengthy e-mails, customized for me, purport to be personal communications when they really aren’t. Sometimes I’ll reply with questions or feedback, and it feels like the entire conversation is with an AI.
When people put in some effort to pitch me their product or article, I’ve always tried to give them a decent reply. Often, I end up learning something or wanting to follow their other work even if I don’t end up writing about what was pitched. This is unfortunately no longer sustainable. There are too many pitches, and it’s demotivating talking to bots. I have to be much more selective about interactions. I appreciate hearing about all the apps, but I’m focusing on the ones that particularly interest me, and I’m less likely to even click the link if it seems like an AI pitch.
Previously:
- Updates to Vibe Coding Apps Rejected From the App Store
- Mac App Store Review Times Increasing
- Bitrig for iOS Early Access
11 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
I’ve been hearing this a lot lately. As a developer who would never use AI for writing, I’ve basically given up on pitching. AI has poisoned the well.
Didn't some person release a (Apple media lauded) app, or service recently that basically did all this stuff for you - the marketing, the pitching, the organising, effectively all the non-programming stuff in trying to get an app to market.
Could we be seeing the outcome of that?
It’s quite challenging to launch a new app these days. A lot of folks can now make their dream project but don’t have an audience to kickstart it with. Maybe we entered app fatigue at the same time as a result?
I think we're in a weird situation right now: the cost of creating an app is trending toward zero, but people still perceive apps as having value. The result is a deluge of commercial apps with little audience.
Why should I pay 20 bucks for an app that mostly does what I want if I can tell an LLM to make one for me that does *exactly* what I want?
There's still room for more complex apps (like, say, an email client), but I'm not sure how long that will remain true.
(As an aside, I guess app devs should be grateful for Apple's walled garden, because their anti-dev policies ironically make it harder for people to vibecode their own stuff on Apple's platforms.)
@Plume it will be interesting to see if "opinionated" software survives in the era you describe. Developers refusing to adopt features, changes, or indeed changing products or pricing paradigms might certainly find themselves replaced.
@Someone The other resource that comes to mind is the App Launch Field Guide, which I’ve not read but heard was good. From the Catalina days, though.
I launched an app this year, and getting eyeballs on it has been the absolute hardest part. It's not vibecoded, I've done my best to adhere to Apple's UI standards, and it's essentially swift native. I've sent a handful of emails to different writers/websites and gotten no response. Reading this post makes me feel a bit better, I assumed my graphic design skills or lack thereof, was killing my chances. Never considered that everyone is just being bombarded with pitch emails. I guess I'll keep trying and will continue to not use AI for communication, that's a no no at work, so why would it be okay out in the real world...
> I think we're in a weird situation right now: the cost of creating an app is trending toward zero, but people still perceive apps as having value.
I dk. I’m working on features that are time consuming and hard. The LLM helps me go faster but I’m not going super fast because the features are big.
I still quite often fix many mistakes, rewrite a bunch of shit because the LLM generates code that is over complicated, buggy, and will crash. But it also automates quite a lot of things and as a solo dev I couldn’t chase some of these features because there isn’t enough hours in the day for one person to do it. So I think it raises the bar - people expect more from apps.
@Someone See also this talk from Lex Friedman (via Daniel Farrelly and Marc Edwards).
