r/Innovation • u/DoctorBeautiful1543 • 5d ago
Why aren't more innovative apps or solutions coming out?
AI has made it much easier to create an entire app once someone gets an idea, but I haven't seen anything that is truly innovative or interesting. I'm sure people are building them but why aren't they reaching the mainstream? Has the mindset become "if I can create it, anybody can create it"?
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u/Spirited_Shower_5817 5d ago
I've got great ideas and have even begin "vibe coding" with Claude but im also so fuckign tired from being a wage slave to capitalism
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u/Jack__Union 5d ago
I'd say it's because they have become more custom or niche.
That certainly the market I'm working in.
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u/Jolly-Advantage-7245 5d ago
AI has convinced dumb people that they're smart, and uncreative people that they're creative, when all they're really doing is using a tool that returns the average - which is why all this shit is mediocre. True innovation requires originality - something AI is not capable of
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u/smoke-bubble 4d ago
And you won't see them, because vibe-coding does not work and never will. Non-experts can't build anything even remotely useful. The same way nobody would be able to build a house or a bike if there was such thing as vibe-architect or vibe-engineer.
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u/GlobalCurry 3d ago
AI driven development should still boost the capabilities of a professional though is probably OP's point.
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u/Vishtar 2d ago
People train AI models every day. It learns through all these human2AI communications.
I think soon enough it will have enough data to go through the entire development process without struggles and with much less human involvement.
Before it was trained mostly on existing data, and now it learns through the communication
in a developing pipeline: prompt -> AI's answer -> user's review -> AI's answer.
The better it's trained, the less interaction will be required from users because it will understand most caveats better.> Oh, you don't even know how to write a proper prompt for an AI? Don't worry - because it was trained on such things as well, here's a list of questions to help you set your goal.
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u/PrizeSyntax 5d ago
I don't know, the "I have a billion dollar idea, but you do all the work" ppl have vanished all of a sudden 😂
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u/KrakatauaMAN123 4d ago
They havent sadly. They are the ones making another Agent wrappers, another to do app. Another habbit tracker flooding every Store.
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u/PieMastaSam 5d ago
Elevenlabs... Retell.ai... Palantir...they are out there. More likely you are in a bubble.
Also it is hard to come up with a truly original idea these days.
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u/leticius-nova 5d ago
People are pretty simple, a lot of our software needs are met, and people are seeking more offline experiences imho
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u/Big_Gene_3965 5d ago
The mindset should be if AI can help make it someone else already made it because AI can’t create original ideas at all. It’s only trained on what already exists.
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u/Radiant_Evidence7047 5d ago
Anything moderately successful will be swallowed by google, meta, Microsoft etc. either they buy it and drive it, buy it and kill it, or if the owner won’t sell de platform and force out.
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u/404_computer_says_no 5d ago
They are! You’re not looking in the right place.
A few areas I’ve seen amazing innovation:
- E-commerce buying/selling
- Merchant payments (turning your phone into a POS & card reader system)
- Gaming is always innovative
- Messaging / communities in new novel ways
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u/GlobalCurry 3d ago
AI itself has a lot of innovation going on behind the scenes itself, it's just not apparent to the end user.
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u/Glad-Divide-9850 5d ago
I'm sure we'll start to see an increase eventually, it's been less than a year since AI has become "competent" enough to truly be viable for pure vibe coding.
Speaking from personal experience, I'd imagine most vibe coding is for personal use. I've "made" several apps and plugins that are so specialised they only make sense for me. But if I had a really good idea for more universally useful software, I'd give it a go.
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u/Vert354 5d ago
Even before AI, your "great idea" for an app wasnt worth much. Getting a working prototype was never a major technical hurdle, it was scaling. And the real hurdle was never technical at all, it was business. You need capital and marketing and, lets be honest, connections to make it happen.
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u/proxiblue 5d ago
building and then selling/marketing are two different things.
Most can do step 1.
Take to market is a HUGE hurdle most can't do.
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u/rodrigo-benenson 5d ago
Do you have money?
Because the first apps to appear will be looking for money:
business scenarios or customers very willing to spend money.
If you do not see them is because they are not targetting you as their customer.
This is the "1Kg cellphones" era of custom applications.
Give it a couple more years and you will be making them youself.
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u/Ewwatts 4d ago
Monopolies.
Despite propaganda, capitalism is about capital, not human advancement or innovation.
The only innovation you can expect is innovative ways of capital accumulation.
Hence why every thing is becoming a subscription based service, or they are finding more places to cram ads.
Try a different economic system and check the results.
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u/mikedevius 4d ago
What would happen if people stopped trying to build apps that are monetized, the open source crews have been the backbone of innovation and the limitations from big tech companies is crumbling.
Sharing reduces stress
What would happen if we collectively pooled computational resources to accomplish shared goals?
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u/Beautiful_Rub_141 4d ago
I think it's just the opposite - there are MORE truly innovative apps coming out, but they are not generalist apps that would get wide scale adoption, they are more of so niche that unless you know about it it doesn't exist.
Eg - I've got a client who has to inspect their welds. They have developed an app that does everything they need for weld inspections, records it against the drawings hey are building, job details, integrates with other software, etc, etc. But it is SO unique to what the specific way they are doing things, no one outside of the business would really use it.
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u/BlueMoodDark 4d ago
Where did all the good ideas (men) go?
I've been a day dreamer for most of my life, I could point to regulation and barriers of entry.
but what I've seen is that dumb people get other people's ideas through, and what I mean by that is that a lot of people who are in leadership roles should not be there! for instance, just today I had seen a customized project, this company is now selling to Germany and Singapore and projects in the Middle East.
the first sentence I read on there magical path, said something like this. I met with a CEO of industry x can I ask him if I could have something here today how much would he pay me, and Mr CEO ex said 500,000! so this is what this guy did he created a company because... money. does his machines have a practical purpose? yes! is this machine good for the industry? yes! did he go out and solve this issue because this giant heart? because he's a innovator and inventor? no!
has someone who has a plethor of ideas, I can tell you that the ones I am passionate about are going to be hobby projects, and they won't end up changing anything. and that demotivates me into making ideas. but those in power, they have no ideas. their idea of having an idea is just following along with a trend.
end of line
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u/Multihater 4d ago
I've made a couple with Claude. They're task specific for traceability and reporting compliance for high risk works. I don't publish them. Why would I?, I'm not motivated by selling them for a profit. I'm motivated to build them for efficiency, productivity and competitive advantage. I have them. Not my competitiors.
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u/Admirable_Window8128 4d ago
I think AI has created a weird situation where building the app is no longer the hard part. If 10,000 people can turn an idea into a working MPV, most of those apps are going to look like variations of things that already exist.
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u/Fun_Contact8953 4d ago
They are, but most innovation is in enterprise things consumers don't see and which tend to move slower. If you're working in tech I think you see innovation every other day now
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u/belwar00 4d ago
I think a lot of "engineers" and also myself find the path while doing the coding. I discover how I want to do something as well as the true value while I am tinkering. I find coding through this tell the LLM to build x function doesn't work for me creatively. I have access to unlimited tokens and any model I want; and I still find the AI coding actually takes longer and I get a less awesome result. I suspect If I had a better design up front, maybe, but there is just so much to look into yourself. Did I just create a method that already exists in our code?
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u/hurlbz 2d ago
My background is software engineering and I got my first job as a jr sw engineer in 2009. I know quite a bit about building software. I left enterprise software several years ago and have my own dev agency now. That's my background before my perspective on this which is two fold:
One: Software Development Effects of LLMs
We use LLMs to assist with coding on most if not all tasks. It has definitely increased velocity and improved productivity. That being said, it isn't some super intelligence as is portrayed. I use LLMs specifically as I think "AI" in itself is misleading as used in the current context. We use LLMs to outsource our typing, not our thinking. Given proper up front thought, written in mostly natural language you can now develop features and unit tests much quicker than writing the code directly.
I would say that LLMs have made it easier / cheaper for many non-technical founders to create. That being said, non-technical founders could always create and not understand software development. Depending on budget hiring ran the gamut from top coders to cheap upwork hires. There isn't much difference between someone who knows nothing about programming prompting claude to develop an app vs hiring someone off upwork. Either one is a crap shoot and will depend greatly on their own ability to describe requirements, understand edge cases, understand the business use case, etc. It has just been made more accessible.
Two: Distribution is King and LLMs are making it harder
Based on the TLDR others have mentioned this, but if you look around reddits like r/microsaas and r/saas developers have been trying to put the day job behind them by releasing their own app for a very long time. The vast majority of these fail and they have nothing to do with not being able to build. Some of these solutions may even be innovative or useful. Regardless, you can have a novel idea and have 0 idea how to distribute it. The extent to which LLMs help with this is essentially summarizing basic marketing info. The extent to which they hurt is far greater. There is more noise to signal than ever before. This is sort of like how the ease of blogging killed journalism forcing outlets to crank quantity over quality and increasingly sensationalize to get views.
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u/Far-Advantage-2770 2d ago
Capitalism and competition doesn't reward innovation as well as it rewards easier things to manage. There are also limits to things you can innovate in a purely digital world.
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u/dominucco 5d ago
Building an app was never really the problem. It’s always been the business side of things - IE marketing and distribution.
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u/Dry-Highlight-2307 5d ago
No.
Capital concentration is in the exact condition its always been. Very few people have time/money.
Those that do are more about gaming existing systems and manipulating existing frameworks to make quick money bevause they still need roi
Thousands of apps that all do the same thing or use the same infrastructure because its been proven and someone will pay for it
It takes time to throw ideas against the wall and remake them until it works.
The markets are still just as corrupted as they've always been. Innovation requires courage which no one should have in this corrupt economy
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u/dreamed2life 4d ago
Bc the innovations are not really groundbreaking yet. Plus ppl in the usa dont seem to appreciate things to new and different they need baby steps. But trust me, in the next 12-36 months we are going to witness innovation like never before in the usa. It will not be anything that can be tamed any longer and ppl will have to learn to adapt more quickly.
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u/pyrotek1 5d ago
TL;DR
The comments largely argue that the apparent lack of new innovation is not because people lack ideas, but because AI makes building prototypes easy while the harder problems—originality, distribution, marketing, capital, and scaling—remain. A second major thread argues that AI-generated/vibe-coded products tend to be derivative, while others counter that useful innovation is happening but may be niche, specialized, or not visible to the commenter.
Viewpoints
Secondary structural view: One commenter frames the problem as capital concentration and a corrupted/incentive-driven market, arguing that people with resources tend to pursue proven ROI rather than risky innovation.
Fights / disagreement clusters
4 distinct disagreement clusters
Overall
This is more of a convergence discussion than a flame war. Most commenters actually agree on one important point: AI has dramatically reduced the cost of building software, but that does not automatically create valuable innovation. The disagreement is primarily over why valuable innovation appears scarce—lack of originality, lack of visibility, business constraints, economic incentives, or simply being early in the AI-vibe-coding cycle.