It took Rebecca Yu seven days to code her dining app. He was tired of the decision fatigue that came from people in chat groups not being able to decide where to eat.
Armed with determination, Claude, and ChatGPT, Yu decided to just build a dining app from scratch – one that will recommend restaurants to him and his friends based on similar interests.
“After the vibe-coding app came out, I started hearing about people with no tech background successfully creating their own apps,” he told TechCrunch. “When I had a week off before school started, I decided it was the perfect time to make an application.”
So, he created the web app Where2Eat to help him and his friends find places to eat.
Yu is part of a growing trend where, thanks to the rapid advancement of AI technology, it is possible to easily create your own applications for personal use. Most of the web apps are coding, although there are also more vibe coding mobile apps that are only used on phones and personal devices. Some who have registered as Apple developers leave their personal apps in beta on TestFlight.
This is a new era of creating applications that are sometimes called micro-apps, personal apps, or quick apps because their purpose is to be used only by the creator (or the creator plus a few other selected people) and only as long as the creator wants to keep the app. They are not intended for wide distribution or sale.
For example, founder Jordi Amat told TechCrunch that he created a quick web gaming app for his family to play during the holidays and only turn off when the holiday was over.
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Then there is Shamillah Bankiya, a partner at Dawn Capital, who created a podcast translation web application for personal use. Interestingly, Darrell Etherington, a former TechCrunch writer, is now a vice president at SBS Comms, as well as creating his own podcast translation app. “Many people I know use Claude Code, Replit, Bolt, and Lovable to build apps for specific use cases,” he says.
One artist told TechCrunch that he created a “vicarious tracker” for himself to see how many hookahs and drinks he consumed each weekend.
Even professional developers are coding vibe personal apps. Software engineer James Waugh told TechCrunch that he created a web application planning tool to help hobby cooks.
Web and mobile applications
Since tools ranging from Claude Code to Lovable usually don’t require strong coding knowledge just to get a functional application, we are witnessing the start of micro application startups. These apps are extremely context-specific, address a niche need, and then “disappear when the need no longer exists,” Legand L. Burge III, a professor of computer science at Howard University, said.
“It’s similar to how trends in social media appear and then fade away,” Burge III continued. “But now, (it’s) the software itself.”
Yu said he now has six more ideas to code. “It’s really fun to be alive now,” he said.
In some ways, it’s always easy for people with no coding experience to create web applications through platforms without coding like that Bubbles and Adalo, which was launched before LLM became popular. What’s new is the ability to create personalized temporary apps for mobile devices as well. Also new: the growing awareness that anyone can code simply by describing, in plain language, the desired application.
Mobile micro apps are still not as easy as their web counterparts. This is because the default way to run apps on an iPhone is to download them from the App Store, which requires a paid Apple Developer account. But increasingly mobile vibe-coding startups like whatever (which purple $11 million, led by Footwork) and VibeCode (which rose a $9.4 million seed round from Seven Seven Six last year) has emerged to help people build mobile apps.
Christina Melas-Kyriazi, a partner at Bain Capital Ventures, compared this era of app building to social media and Shopify, “where suddenly it was very easy to create content or create an online store, then we saw a small explosion of sales.” she said.
Pretty good for one
However, micro apps also have their problems. For one, building apps is still difficult for some. Yu, for example, said his dining app was not hard to make; it’s just too time-consuming. He had to rely on ChatGPT and Claude to help him understand some coding decisions. “Once I learned how to quickly and efficiently solve problems, building became easier,” he said.
Then there is the quality issue. Those private apps may have bugs or critical security flaws – they just can’t be sold publicly.
But there is still significant potential in the era of private app building, especially as AI and its reasoning, quality, and security models become more sophisticated over time.
A software engineer, Waugh said he once created an app for a friend who had heart disease. They made him a logger that allowed him to record when he had heart problems so he could more easily show the doctor. “A great example of personal software that helps you keep track of the things that matter,” TechCrunch said.
Another founder, Nick Simpson, told TechCrunch that he was so bad at paying parking tickets – as a result of San Francisco’s difficult parking availability – that he decided to build an app that would pay automatically after scanning the ticket. As a registered Apple developer, the app is in beta in TestFlight, but he said a bunch of friends now want it, too.
However, Burge III believes that these types of apps can open up “exciting opportunities” for businesses and creators to create “hyper-personalized situational experiences.”
Etherington added, saying he believes there will come a day when people stop subscribing to apps that have monthly fees. However, they will only create their own applications for personal use.
Meanwhile, Melas-Kyriazi, expects to use personal and fast applications like spreadsheets like Google Sheets or Excel used to.
“It’s really going to fill the gap between the spreadsheet and the full product,” he said.
One media strategist, Hollie Krause, said she didn’t like the apps her doctor recommended, so she created her own to help her track her allergies.
He had no technical experience and finished the web app at the same time he took his wife to dinner and back. Now, he says, he has two web apps, which he built with Claude: one for allergies and sensitivities, and another for monitoring chores around the house.
“I was like ‘wow I hate Excel but I love making apps for our household,'” Krause told TechCrunch. “So, I played and hosted on Tiiny.host and put it on our cell phone.”
He thinks vibe coding will bring “a lot of innovation and problem-solving to communities that don’t have access to others,” and hopes to test allergy health apps to roll them out to others.
“The app will help others who are struggling to navigate life for themselves, and caregivers can also gain access,” he said. “I really think the coding vibe means I can help people.”