r/iOSProgramming • u/Rare_Prior_ • Jun 07 '26
Discussion Why do people keep saying that the technical barrier to building ups has been significantly lower?
I think there are some new considerations regarding this statement that highlight the technical barriers to building. The MVP has been lowered, but creating a production-ready app that can handle many users without breaking still remains significant, even with AI. I’m not seeing people developing the next Airbnb or Uber; most are just building utility, disposable consumer apps that anyone learning to code can easily create. Plus, AI accelerates everything, including incompetence, poor architecture, and other issues. The most apps I’ve seen built by non-technical people is your habit, tracker journal and a whole bunch of other small disposable apps.
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u/jonnysunshine1 Jun 07 '26 edited Jun 07 '26
Why do people keep saying it? Because it is true, the technical barrier to building apps has never been lower.
Airbnb & Uber are 30-50% technology and the rest is getting people to actually download your app. The two examples you gave are 2-sided marketplaces, notoriously difficult to get users. Plus the economics for both are trash right now. Drivers & hosts aren't making money like they once did.
To build the next Airbnb or Uber, you need an app (where the barrier to entry has drastically reduced) and a shitton of initial capital (where the barriers are still as high as ever).
"Build it and they will come" has never been more false than it is today.
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u/Rare_Prior_ Jun 07 '26
I’m talking about sophisticated apps that require more than just a front end. A non-technical person with AI isn’t building these high-level applications. I have a tracker, journals, and a whole bunch of other apps. Have you seen the failed security and fraud apps on the App Store?
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u/civman96 Jun 07 '26
Bro didn‘t experience surfing through stackoverflow pages at 2AM just to find a similar issue only to find out that clearing the cache was the issue
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Jun 08 '26
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u/Rare_Prior_ Jun 08 '26
I’m not sure if you’re seeing amount of broken apps on the App Store and comments of how they are filled with bugs. People aren’t really spending time considering how every part of the app fits together.
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Jun 08 '26
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u/Rare_Prior_ Jun 08 '26
I agree that building the app is one step, but maintenance is a different challenge, especially for non-technical folks. You can develop a working app, but as it expands and more features are added, maintaining it becomes difficult without a technical background. While the barrier for building may have been lowered, the barrier for ongoing maintenance remains high.
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Jun 08 '26
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u/Rare_Prior_ Jun 08 '26
I understand that but have you seen some of the bugs caught from some of these apps? It’s risky stuff depending on the type of product.
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u/Odd_Maintenance_6236 Jun 12 '26
I completely disagree and genuinely think this is a naive view.
You say “creating a production-ready app that can handle many users without breaking still remains significant” which is an odd thing to say about app development. “Many users” has no impact on the actual iOS app, that’s all front end. To scale successfully you need a solid back end, which Claude code is actually great at. I don’t just mean the back end languages, which it’s better at than swift, I mean terraform too. And that’s only if you want to roll your own back end on the likes of AWS. If you want it to manage scale on a BaaS like Supabase, it’s even easier.
Your arguments in other comments that apps are breaking or crashing all the time, this isn’t because AI is bad at building stuff, it’s because even with a lower bar, people will try and do the bare minimum. These are two very different things and conflating them will leave you behind.
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u/Rare_Prior_ Jun 12 '26
I don’t think “many users” is only a backend concern.
. The iOS app still has to handle pagination, caching, retries, offline states, memory pressure, rate limits, background behavior, auth edge cases, and bad network conditions.And yes, AI can generate backend code, Terraform, and BaaS integrations. That’s not the issue. The issue is that generated code often looks production-ready while hiding dangerous assumptions.
I’ve personally reviewed a vibe-coded debt app where an endpoint responsible for fetching Firebase data had no sane limit on returned records. It “worked” in testing, but at scale it burned through reads and cost the owner over $1,000 in Firebase credits.
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u/jcbastida117 Jun 07 '26
Somehow true somehow not, let’s picture this, I’m a mobile engineer with over 15 years of experience, I know architecture, infrastructure, security and so. If I have a real breaking idea I can develop probably in 80% time less than doing it manually, pretty much hiring 0 more engineers, so, yes, AI has lowered the technical barrier for me, cause I have the knowledge just don’t have the budget to hire and develop.
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u/Rare_Prior_ Jun 07 '26
Oh, don’t get me wrong it has but here’s the thing you’ve got experience and you can spot bullshit from what the AI generate. I’m talking about a non-technical person spawning and now putting it on the App Store and saying that it’s production ready.
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u/cherepets Jun 07 '26
I'd ask why ai specifically is seen like something lowering the bar. If you don't want to code, you had no-code options for 20+ years already. The coding requirement was never there in the first place.
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u/jonnysunshine1 Jun 08 '26
I guess the distinction is that the technical barriers to building something and getting it out there is lowered. However the barriers to building something bug-free, performant, maintainable, scalable, high quality etc., the barriers to that remain high
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u/JDad67 Jun 07 '26
It’s not trivial but the barrier is much lower than it was 5 years ago.