What Happened
AI is making software radically easier to produce. The result is beginning to look less like a productivity boom than an oversupply shock.
A recent NBER paper (which I've mentioned here previously) tracks more than 100,000 developers as they adopt successive generations of AI coding tools. The effects on coding are enormous: commits rise roughly 180%. But the effect shrinks as you go downstream closer to customers. Projects rise only about 50%, releases about 30%, and, across four major app marketplaces, the authors find more new apps but no increase in total usage.
Specifically, in the Apple App Store data, new iOS releases roughly doubled between early 2025 and April 2026. Yet engagement with each new group of apps was flat or falling, while a fast-growing fraction failed to get any audience at all
Newly scraped App Store data suggests the NBER paper may already understate what is happening.
The first chart below shows new developers by year. There were 69,385 new developers in 2024, almost doubling to 106,471 in 2025, and rising 70% to 172,516 so far in 2026. There were more new developers added in the first quarter of 2026 than in any prior year before 2025,
The second shows US App Store releases. Monthly releases were generally 10,000–15,000 through 2024. They began accelerating in 2025, then exploded in 2026, with July approaching 90,000 releases. There were more new apps released in July alone than in all of 2024.
Combining the NBER and this new data: Software supply is going vertical, but demand isn't.