Something interesting is happening in the app world. With the arrival of more powerful AI, everyone is building their own.

We do weekly meetups in the Robot Assistant Field Guide, called the Robot Builders Club. We cover all sorts of angles for the intentional use of this technology, and several people who have gone through the course have made their own apps.

John Voorhees over at MacStories had an insightful post on the utility app flood and why he thinks it will eventually ebb. We are definitely going through something right now, as my email inbox has mushroomed with new developers wanting me to look at their apps.

The more interesting angle for me, however, is the folks building apps not for the App Store, but for themselves. Most people making their own apps in the Robot Builders Club don’t intend to ever publish them.

Instead, I see a lot of people building bespoke apps to solve a unique problem they have. One guy made an app that lets his elderly father review family photos in a view with no “delete” button he could accidentally hit. Another participant made a time-blocking app that works just right for him. There are a lot more such stories. A few weeks ago, I made my own custom app to drive my Vestaboard.

I once read that Steve Wozniak explained that there wasn’t much software for the Apple II at launch because he thought people would write their own. What was optimistic in 1977 is true now.

These scratch-my-own-itch apps are made by and for one person. I’m sure Apple must be tracking this, but I think it’s time for them to have a different class of developer account for people who want to make their own apps just to use by themselves or with a small team.

Right now, a free Apple Account gets you most of the way. You can build something in Xcode and install it on your own iPhone without a paid developer account.

The problem is that the provisioning profile expires after seven days and you have to rebuild and reinstall your own app just to keep using it. Also, there’s a cap of three test devices per platform and a separate cap of three apps installed per device.

The only currently available fix is the $99/year Apple Developer Program, which is the same account Apple sells to companies shipping software to millions of customers. Paying commercial developer rates to keep an app I wrote for myself on my own phone makes no sense.

I think Apple needs to address this. The easiest first step is to kill the seven-day expiration for personal builds. Give us a free or nearly free tier that signs an app permanently for your own devices and a handful of others, with no option for App Store review and no public listing, since nothing is going public anyway.

Apple already built the pieces. Shortcuts travel person to person with no review at all, and enterprise distribution has put apps on employee phones outside the App Store for years. I think they need to aim that same machinery at individuals. Maybe call it a $20/year “Personal Developer Program.”

While I believe folks madly vibe-coding utility apps for the App Store will be disappointed in the long run, people building their own solutions to a very specific problem will be quite happy. As the models get more powerful, more and more people will do this. Now we just need Apple to acknowledge this new type of developer and find a way to support them.