The Great App Explosion: Will We Drown in Our Own Digital Productivity?
The promise and peril of putting app creation in everyone's hands
AI-powered development tools are democratizing creation like never before—but are we ready for a sea of digital solutions and ecosystem problems at unseen scale?
Having built various software for years and currently working on ways to help people make, what I'm witnessing right now is both exciting and terrifying. We're not just democratizing app creation—we may be about to drown in our own digital productivity.
The Numbers Reveal the Scale of What's Coming
While everyone debates whether AI will replace developers, something more fundamental has been happening: AI has been creating millions of new developers who don't know what they don't know.
Adjacent data points point to this scale (Some of these number may even be larger today than when they came out):
Citizen developers will deliver 30% of genAI-infused automation apps" in 2025, leveraging their domain expertise. Source.
At large enterprises, citizen developers are predicted to outnumber professional developers by 4 to 1. Source.
By 2025, 70% of new applications will use low-code or no-code technologies, up from less than 25% in 2020. Source.
70% of users without coding experience mastered low-code tools within a month. Source.
GitHub Copilot users report significant productivity gains, with an 8.69% increase in pull requests and a 15% increase in PR merge rates, reducing time to PR by days (from 9.6 to 2.4 days) in some cases. Source.
AI app revenue surged to $2 billion in the first eight months of 2024, with projections reaching $3.3 billion—a 51% year-on-year surge. Source.
The Apple App Store sees about 50,000 new app releases monthly as of 2025, up from 33,000 in September 2024. Source.
But here's what those numbers don't capture: the quality curve is inverting for some of these apps. We're not just getting better apps—we're also getting more apps that solve problems their creators actually understand.
Vibe Coding, the Double-Edged Revolution
There's a lot to get excited about with “vibe coding” (describing what you want in plain English and letting AI generate the code), but it also makes me wonder about the implications. One that particularly concerns me is "solution pollution."
Just like industrial pollution, solution pollution happens when production becomes so easy that we stop thinking about consequences. When anyone can build an app in an afternoon, everyone does—whether the world needs that app or not.
The Development Pyramid Has Flipped
Seven months ago, I watched something that really shook what I knew but assumed were more theory. A client's marketing manager used Claude to create a "better" version of a dashboard feature her product team had spent six weeks perfecting. Her version wasn't technically elegant. It probably broke half of their design principles. But users (people on her team) loved it because she understood their workflow in ways carefully researched personas never captured.
That moment forced the truth about the new world we’re in: Domain expertise combined with AI assistance can now compete with traditional development approaches—even when the code is messy and the architecture is questionable. And this, will lead to even more apps being created.
A healthcare worker who understands patient workflow can now build a better patient management tool using Claude than a developer team working from user stories—even if the code isn't optimized. There are consumers in the market who don’t care about elegant code as long as the solution actually solves the problem.
Traditional software development looked like a pyramid:
Top: Professional developers (scarce, quality-focused)
Middle: Technical-adjacent roles (some scripting)
Base: End users (software consumers)
Now, depending on the scenario, it's inverted:
New Top: Domain experts with AI tools (fast, problem-focused, quality-uncertain)
Middle: Professional developers (becoming infrastructure specialists)
Expanding Base: Millions of AI-powered citizen developers; Tools like Claude, Replit, and V0 are only making it easier to turn casual descriptions into functional applications. The barrier between "having an idea" and "having a working app" has collapsed.
While there are so many great things we’ll see from this, it also creates what the “Maintenance Debt Crisis”. Professional developers used to gatekeep quality. Are they now becoming archaeologists, trying to understand systems built by people who've moved on to other problems?
The Uncomfortable Truth Nobody Talks About
In the current state of the world, it won’t surprise me if 90% of these AI-generated apps become digital pollution within 18 months.
Unlike traditional software development, where high barriers meant only serious (or committed?) solutions got built, the new reality is that every workflow annoyance becomes an app. I'm already seeing organizations with hundreds of tiny applications that don't talk to each other, security vulnerabilities baked in by well-meaning domain experts, and a growing graveyard of abandoned "solutions."
What Dies in This Transition
Several foundational assumptions that some may argue are now obsolete:
"Good software requires careful planning" → AI rewards speed over forethought
"Code quality matters for long-term success" → Working solutions beat maintainable architectures
"Professional oversight ensures security" → Domain experts don't know what they don't know
"Software development is specialized" → Building apps becomes a general business skill
"IT controls enterprise applications" → Nearly 60% of custom apps are built outside IT departments (2017 study by 451 Research), with Gartner predicting 80% of low-code users will be from outside IT by 2026
We're moving from a craft mindset (skilled artisans building quality) to an industrial mindset (mass production with externalized costs).
The Fork in the Road
Despite all the excitement with lower hurdle to build software, the flip side of this worries me whether we're approaching a critical decision point:
Path 1: The Polluted Future
Millions of AI-generated apps clutter digital ecosystems. Organizations drown in their own productivity. Technical debt becomes unmaintainable. We end up with a digital world that's more capable and more fragile than anything we've built.
Path 2: The Guided Future
We use this transition to build better infrastructure for creation itself. Professional developers become architects of platforms that make citizen development safe. Domain experts get tools that help them build responsibly. We channel creative energy toward solutions that actually matter.
The latter is a future that would excite me, the artisans, and the consumers of these apps very much.
The Opportunities in the Chaos
To head closer towards the Guided Future, here's where I see the highest impact opportunities for builders.
1. Become a Bridge Builder
The future belongs to people who can connect domain expertise with technical reality. Don't choose sides - become the translator between AI-powered prototyping and engineering rigor needed for scale.
2. Focus on Questions, Not Answers
When anyone can implement solutions, competitive advantage shifts to asking better questions: What problem are we really solving? What breaks when this scales? Who takes responsibility when things go wrong? This is one of the reasons why we've been experimenting with workflow tools like Flyway at Be01, helping teams ask better questions before they build.
3. Build Infrastructure for Chaos
Instead of fighting the app explosion, build the infrastructure that makes it manageable. The opportunities are in governance platforms, integration tools, and security frameworks that citizen developers can't break.
4. Cultivate Judgment
In a world where technical implementation becomes commoditized, the scarcest resource is judgment: knowing what to build, when to build it, and when to stop. This can't be automated. It has to be earned.
Higher stakes than we think?
Look, I don't know if we're heading toward a digital utopia or a maintenance nightmare. Probably both. What I do know is that ignoring this shift won't make it go away—the app explosion is happening whether we’re ready or not.
Maybe we figure out how to channel all this creative energy into solutions that actually matter. Maybe we drown in a sea of abandoned weekend projects and security vulnerabilities baked in by well-meaning builders.
The great app explosion is here, and it seems like a good community problem to figure out together as we go. I'm still figuring this out myself. If you're wrestling with similar questions, I'd love to hear how you're thinking about this transition.