Rebecca Yu spent seven days building a dining app to solve a common problem: the decision fatigue from group chats unable to choose where to eat. Using determination and AI tools like Claude and ChatGPT, she created the web app Where2Eat. It recommends restaurants based on the shared interests of her and her friends. Yu told TechCrunch that after hearing about people with no tech backgrounds building apps through vibe-coding, she used a week off before school to finally create her application.
Yu is part of a growing trend. Rapid advancements in AI technology now allow people to easily build apps for personal use. Most are coding web applications, but many are also vibe coding mobile apps intended to run only on their personal phones. Some registered Apple developers even leave these personal apps in beta on TestFlight.
This new era of app creation is called micro apps, personal apps, or fleeting apps. They are designed for the creator and a select few people, only for as long as the creator wants. They are not meant for wide distribution or sale. For example, founder Jordi Amat built a fleeting web gaming app for his family to play over the holidays and shut it down once the vacation ended.
Others are joining the movement. Shamillah Bankiya, a partner at Dawn Capital, is building a podcast translation web app for personal use. Darrell Etherington, a former TechCrunch writer, is also building his own personal podcast translation app. He noted that many people are using tools like Claude Code, Replit, Bolt, and Lovable to build apps for specific cases. One artist built a “vice tracker” to monitor his weekend consumption of hookahs and drinks. Even professional developers are participating; software engineer James Waugh built a web app planning tool for his cooking hobby.
Tools like Claude Code and Lovable often don’t require robust coding knowledge to create a functional app, leading to the early rise of micro apps. These are extremely context-specific, address niche needs, and disappear when the need is gone, explained Legand L. Burge III, a professor of computer science at Howard University. He compared it to social media trends that appear and fade, but now it’s software itself.
Yu said she now has six more ideas she wants to code, adding it’s really exciting to be alive right now. While no-code platforms like Bubble and Adalo made web app creation accessible before, what’s new is the rising ability to create personal, temporary apps for mobile devices. Also new is the growing realization that anyone can code by describing the app they want in regular language.
Mobile micro apps still face more hurdles than web apps because loading an app on an iPhone typically requires a paid Apple Developer account and the App Store. However, mobile vibe-coding startups like Anything and VibeCode have emerged to help people build mobile apps.
Christina Melas-Kyriazi, a partner at Bain Capital Ventures, compared this era to the rise of social media and Shopify, where it suddenly became easy to create content or an online store, leading to an explosion of small sellers.
Micro apps do have issues. Building an app can be tedious and time-consuming. Yu said her dining app wasn’t hard to create but was very time-consuming, requiring help from ChatGPT and Claude to understand coding decisions. There are also quality concerns; such personal apps may have bugs or critical security flaws and cannot be sold as-is to the masses.
Yet there is significant potential as AI and model reasoning, quality, and security improve. Software engineer James Waugh built an app for a friend with heart palpitations, a logger to record episodes for her doctor. Another founder, Nick Simpson, built an app to automatically pay his parking tickets in San Francisco. His app is in beta on TestFlight, and now many of his friends want it too.
Legand Burge III believes these apps can open exhilarating opportunities for businesses and creators to build hyper-personalized situational experiences. Darrell Etherington added that a day may dawn when people stop subscribing to apps with monthly fees and instead build their own.
Christina Melas-Kyriazi expects personal, fleeting apps to be used like spreadsheets such as Google Sheets or Excel were once used, filling the gap between a spreadsheet and a full-fledged product.
Media strategist Hollie Krause didn’t like the apps her doctor recommended, so she built her own web app to track her allergies. With no technical experience, she finished it in the time it took her husband to go to dinner. She and her husband now have two web apps built with Claude: one for allergies and another for household chores. She hosted it on Tiiny.host and put it on their cellphones.
Krause believes vibe coding will bring a lot of innovation and problem-solving to communities that otherwise wouldn’t have access. She hopes to beta-test her allergy app to one day release it to others, helping people who struggle to navigate life and their caregivers. She truly thinks vibe coding means she can help people.