Now That AI Makes App Development Easy, Is the Dream of Striking It Rich as an Indie Developer Over?

Years ago, I tried developing an app on my own in the hope of striking it rich.

It was a crushing defeat. The app barely sold, and before long, I stopped developing it altogether.

Recently, however, generative AI has made app development dramatically easier. Work that once took weeks can sometimes be finished in a few hours simply by giving instructions to an AI.

If that is the case, perhaps it would be interesting to take another shot at making it big as an indie developer.

With that thought in mind, I looked into the current market for independently developed apps.

My conclusion is that it feels even more hopeless than it did before.

Not Just a Red Ocean, but a Scorched Wasteland

The consumer app market was already saturated before AI appeared.

Budgeting apps, scheduling apps, utility tools—any app you might think of has already been built by someone.

Then generative AI arrived.

Today, even without much programming knowledge, you can give instructions to an AI and end up with a reasonably functional app.

For people who want to build things, this is a dream come true. For people who want to make money from them, it is a nightmare.

If you can build something easily, so can people all over the world.

Even if you come up with a useful idea, hundreds or thousands of other people are thinking about the same thing.

It no longer looks merely like a red ocean. It looks like a scorched wasteland where not even weeds can grow.

Being Able to Build Something and Being Able to Sell It Are Two Different Things

Suppose you build a new app. How do you get users to discover it?

Large companies can spend money on advertising. They can collaborate with popular characters or funnel users in from their existing services.

Independent developers, on the other hand, have neither that kind of money nor that kind of name recognition.

No matter how good an app is, if no one knows it exists, that is the end of the story.

AI has dramatically reduced development costs. It has not made advertising any cheaper.

The traditional engineer’s belief that technical skill alone is enough to compete no longer holds true.

If There Is Still a Chance to Strike It Rich, Is It in Games?

So where, if anywhere, does an independent developer still have a chance to make it big?

Personally, I think it may be in games or content built around characters.

For example, a game with extremely simple controls that somehow becomes addictive, or a work whose distinctive world and characters become a sensation on social media.

Useful apps have substitutes. An entertaining character or a memorable game experience, however, cannot be replaced simply by copying its features.

Of course, this is not an easy market either.

AI also lowers the barrier to game development, and people all over the world are thinking the same thing.

On top of that, the ability to make an entertaining game and the ability to turn it into a hit are two different things.

In the end, this too seems likely to be something close to playing the lottery.

What AI Took Away Was the Engineer’s Advantage

In the past, an idea was not enough. Without technical skill, you could not build an app. That gave people who knew how to program a certain advantage.

AI has now drastically reduced that advantage.

Development has become easier for engineers, but at the same time, people who are not engineers can now enter the market.

Going forward, making money from independent development will probably depend more on factors such as product planning, marketing, and an existing customer base than on development ability.

There are still areas with potential, such as niche business applications built on deep knowledge of a particular industry. But that is quite different from the dream I once had: “Publish an app, then watch money pour in from around the world while I sleep.”

Apparently, AI has made the dream of building an app easy to achieve.

But thanks to AI, the dream of striking it rich with an app seems to have moved even further out of reach.