It took Rebecca Yu seven days to encode the vibes into her food app. She was fed up with the decision fatigue that occurs when people in a group chat can't decide where to eat.
Armed with determination, Claude and ChatGPT, Yu made up his mind just build a restaurant app from scratch — one that would recommend restaurants to her and her friends based on their shared interests.
“When vibration coding apps came out, I started hearing about people with no tech knowledge who were successfully building their own apps,” she told TechCrunch. “When I had a week off before school started, I decided it was the perfect time to finally create my app.”
So she created the Where2Eat online app to help her and her friends find places to eat.
Yu is part of a growing trend of people who, thanks to the rapid advancement of AI technology, can easily build their own applications for their own use. Most of them are involved in coding web applications, although increasingly they are also coding mobile applications that are designed to run only on their personal phones and devices. Some who are already registered as Apple developers are leaving their beta personal apps on TestFlight.
This is a new era of app development, sometimes called micro-apps, personal apps, or staging apps because they are intended to be used only by the creator (or the creator and a few other people) and only for as long as the creator wants to keep the app. They are not intended for wide distribution and sale.
For example, founder Jordi Amat told TechCrunch that he created a temporary online gaming app for his family to play during the holidays and simply closed it once the holiday was 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, Darrell Etherington, former TechCrunch writer and now VP of SBS Comms, is also building his own podcast translation app. “Many people I know use Claude Code, Replit, Bolt and Lovable to create applications for specific applications,” he said.
One artist told TechCrunch that he built himself a “substitution tracker” to see how many hookahs and drinks he drank each weekend.
Even professional developers code personal applications in the form of vibrations. Software engineer James Waugh told TechCrunch that he created a web app scheduler to help him pursue his cooking hobby.
Web and mobile applications
Since tools from Claude Code to Lovable typically do not require solid coding knowledge to access a functional application, we are witnessing the early development of micro applications. These are extremely context-sensitive applications that meet niche needs and then “disappear when there is no longer a need,” said Legand L. Burge III, a computer science professor at Howard University.
“It's like social media trends coming and going,” Burge III continued. “But now (it's) just software.”
Yu said she now has six more ideas she wants to code. “It's really exciting to be alive right now,” she said.
In some ways, it has always been easy for a person without much coding experience to create web applications through no-code platforms like Bubble and Adalo, which were launched before LLMs became popular. What's new is the growing ability to create personal, temporary applications also for mobile devices. What's new: the growing awareness that anyone can program by describing the application they want in plain language.
Mobile micro apps are still not as simple as their web counterparts. This is because the standard way to load an app on iPhone is to download it from the App Store, which requires a paid Apple developer account. But increasingly mobile vibration encoding startups like it All (Which lifted up $11 million, led by Footwork) and Vibe Code (which raised a $9.4 million seed round from Seven Seven Six last year) emerged to help people create mobile applications.
Christina Melas-Kyriazi, a partner at Bain Capital Ventures, compared this era of social media app development to Shopify, “where all of a sudden it became really easy to create content or set up an online store, and then we saw an explosion of small sellers.” she said.
Good enough for one
Still, microapps also have problems. Creating and sharing code with others can be quite expensive given the subscriptions required, especially if all costs are tied to just one application. For some, app development also remains boring. Yu, for example, said that creating her restaurant app wasn't difficult; it was just very time consuming. She had to rely on ChatGPT and Claude to help her understand some of the coding decisions. “When I learned how to solve problems quickly and efficiently, building became much easier,” she said.
Then there are quality issues. These personal apps may contain bugs or critical security vulnerabilities – they can't simply be sold to the masses as-is.
However, there is still significant potential in the era of personal app development, especially as artificial intelligence and model reasoning, quality and security become more sophisticated over time.
Software engineer Waugh said he once created an app for a friend who had heart palpitations. He built her a recorder that allowed her to record heart problems so she could more easily show them to her doctor. “A great example of one-off personal software that helps you track something important,” he told TechCrunch.
Another founder, Nick Simpson, told TechCrunch that he was so bad at paying parking tickets – a consequence of the difficult availability of parking spaces in San Francisco – that he decided to build an app that would automatically pay after scanning the ticket. As an Apple Registered Developer, his app is in beta on TestFlight, but he said a few of his friends now want it too.
Nevertheless, Burge III believes that these types of applications could open up “exciting opportunities” for companies and creators to create “hyper-personalized situational experiences.”
Etherington added to this by saying that he believes the day is coming when people will stop subscribing to monthly fee apps. Instead, they will simply create their own apps for personal use.
Meanwhile, Melas-Kyriazi expects that personal, ephemeral applications will be used in the same way that spreadsheets like Google Sheets and Excel were once used.
“This will really bridge the gap between a spreadsheet and a full-fledged product,” she said.
One media strategist, Hollie Krause, decided she didn't like the apps her doctor recommended, so she created one herself that could help her track her allergies.
She had no technical experience and completed the online application at the same time it took her husband to and from dinner. She said they now have two web apps, both built in partnership with Claude: one for allergies and sensitivities and the other for homework tracking.
“I thought, 'Wow, I hate Excel, but I would love to create an app for our home,'” Krause told TechCrunch. “So I launched it, put it on Tiiny.host and put it on our cell phones.”
He believes vibration coding will bring “a lot of innovation and problem-solving to communities that otherwise wouldn't have access,” and hopes to beta-test his allergy treatment app with the goal of making it available to others one day.
“The app will help others who are struggling to navigate life independently, as well as provide caregivers with access to the app,” she said. “I really think vibration coding means I can help people.”
