The rise of ‘micro’ apps: non-developers are writing apps instead of buying them

It took Rebecca Yu seven days to code her food app. She was tired of the decision fatigue that comes when people in a group chat can’t decide where to eat.

Armed with determination, Claude and ChatGPT, Yu decided to do just that just build a food app from scratch – one that would recommend restaurants to her and her friends based on their shared interests.

“As vibe coding apps started popping up, I started hearing about people without tech backgrounds 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 build my application.”

So she created the web app Where2Eat to help her and her friends find places to eat.

Yu is part of the growing trend of people who, thanks to rapid advances in AI technology, can easily build their own apps for personal use. Most code web applications, although increasingly they also code mobile apps intended to run only on their own personal phones and devices. Some who are already registered as Apple developers leave their personal apps in beta on TestFlight.

It’s a new era of creating apps that are sometimes called micro apps, personal apps, or ephemeral apps, because they are only intended to be used by the creator (or the creator plus a select few other people) and only for 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 built a cursory web game app for his family to play during the holidays and simply close it once the holidays were over.

Then there’s Shamillah Bankiya, a partner at Dawn Capital, who is building a podcast translation web app for personal use. Interestingly enough, Darrell Etherington, a former TechCrunch writer and now vice president at SBS Comms, is also building his own personal podcast translation app. “Many people I know use Claude Code, Replit, Bolt and Lovable to build apps for specific use cases,” he said.

One artist told TechCrunch that he built himself a “vice tracker” to see how many bongs and drinks he consumed each weekend.

Even professional developers code personal apps. Software engineer James Waugh told TechCrunch that he built a web app scheduling tool to help him with his cooking hobby.

Web apps and mobile

Since tools ranging from Claude Code to Lovable typically don’t require deep coding knowledge to create a functional app, we’re witnessing the early rise of micro-apps. These are apps that are extremely context-specific, address niche needs and then “disappear when the need is no longer present,” says Legand L. Burge III, a professor of computer science at Howard University.

“It’s similar to how trends appear on social media and then disappear,” Burge III continued. “But now, [it’s] software itself.”

Yu said she now has six more ideas she wants to code. “It’s really exciting to be alive now,” she said.

In some ways, it was always easy for someone without much coding experience to create web apps through no-code platforms like Bubble and Adalo, which were launched before LLMs became popular. What’s new is the increasing ability to also create personal, temporary apps for mobile devices. Also new: the growing realization that anyone can code by simply describing the desired app 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 an iPhone is to download it from the App Store, which requires a paid Apple Developer account. But more and more mobile vibe-coding startups are liking it Something (which increased $11 million, led by Footwork) and VibeCode (which makes a $9.4 million seed round from Seven Seven Six last year) were created 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, and then we saw an explosion of small sellers.” she said.

Good enough for one

Yet micro-apps also have problems. First, building an app is still tedious for some. For example, Yu said it wasn’t difficult to create her food app; it just took a lot of time. She had to rely on ChatGPT and Claude to help her understand certain coding decisions. “Once I learned how to identify and solve problems efficiently, building became much easier,” she says.

Then there are quality problems. Such personal apps may contain bugs or critical security flaws; they cannot simply be sold to the masses.

But there is still significant potential in an era of personal app building, especially as AI and model reasoning, quality, and security become more sophisticated over time.

Waugh, the software engineer, said he once built an app for a friend who had palpitations. He built her a logger to record when she had heart problems so she could more easily show her doctor. “Great example of one-off personal software that helps you keep track of something important,” he told TechCrunch.

Another founder, Nick Simpson, told TechCrunch that he was so bad at paying for parking tickets — a result of San Francisco’s poor parking availability — that he decided to build an app that would automatically pay them after scanning the ticket. As a registered Apple developer, his app is in beta on TestFlight, but he said some of his friends now want it too.

Nevertheless, Burge III believes that these types of apps could provide “exciting possibilities” for companies and creators to create “hyper-personalized situational experiences.”

Etherington added, saying he believes a day is coming when people will no longer subscribe to apps that have monthly fees. Instead, they just build their own apps for personal use.

Melas-Kyriazi, meanwhile, expects that the use of personal, ephemeral apps will occur in the same way that spreadsheets like Google Sheets or Excel were once used.

“It’s really going to fill the gap between the spreadsheet and a full-fledged product,” she said.

One media strategist, Hollie Krause, said she didn’t like the apps her doctor kept recommending, so she built one herself that can help her track her allergies.

She had no technical experience and completed the web app in the same time it took her husband to go out to dinner and back. Now, she said, they have two web apps, both built with Claude: one for allergies and sensitivities, and the other to keep track of chores around the house.

“I thought, ‘Wow, I hate Excel, but I would like to make an app for our household,” Krause told TechCrunch. “So I set it up and hosted it on Tiiny.host and put it on our cell phones.”

She thinks vibe-coding will bring “a lot of innovation and problem-solving to communities that wouldn’t otherwise have access,” and hopes to beta test her allergy health app so she can one day release it to others.

“The app will aim to help others who are struggling to manage their own lives, and also give healthcare providers access,” she said. “I really think I can help people with vibe coding.”