The Apple Tree

Before AI became a "thing" and everyone left, right and centre was vibe coding iOS apps, I used what limited knowledge I had of Swift and a very early version of Cursor to write an iOS app called PatchUp. It was one of the first iOS apps I had ever written, and it was very janky to start with. But it taught me the important lesson that one could build anything now, and the real game was getting whatever you had built out into the world!

But even before that app, I was paid to build a Laravel web app, back when there was no such thing as AI... I had to spend hours looking up online docs about Laravel to work out how to build this very basic app.

Since those days I have had a love for both Laravel and iOS. Both are great frameworks and languages, and while I know they are fundamentally different, they are both very cool in what you can do with them.

The Laravel AI Explosion

I remember when Laravel Boost came out and it was a huge thing for me. Laravel was, to me, the first framework I had ever seen in the coding space that came out with a dedicated MCP to help the AI code for it. Yes, many followed afterwards, like Next.js and others, but Laravel was truly the first.

But with the rise of being able to code with agents, and to produce code faster and faster, I have found workflows that are super awesome to use. In some ways they maximise your output in a way that otherwise you could not achieve on iOS, where dedicated apps have to go through review processes. And while I really love producing apps for iOS, I have also come to realise that there is now far too much hype in that space, and the App Store is being overwhelmed with vibe-coded apps. So the only way to basically "win" in that space is to set aside a huge marketing budget that you can spend on ads, just to even get a chance for your app to make it.

And so a large part of me is thinking of no longer making fun iOS apps, and only doing it for work, essentially. Even though I can bring a lot of value to other people's lives, there is no easy way, like in the early days of the App Store, to make a lot of money. There is a very good YouTube video I watched that explains it a lot better than I can: watch it here.

Now, that's not to say I don't like making iOS apps anymore. I do. But I don't think there is a way for any meaningful person who wants to make money from apps to do so without already having a lot of money to spend on marketing and pushing their app up the charts. I've seen references to this online, where people say you need at least $30,000 USD to spend on user-generated-content marketing to get that level of return on your app, which is just not possible for most of the world.

The Laravel Cloud Advantage

One of the things I have really enjoyed recently in coding is Laravel apps. With Laravel Cloud, you're able to host an app in a mere couple of minutes, and with that in mind you're able to make rapid changes to an app that you are using.

What I mean by this is that I was able to make a renovation app to help me track the spending on my new home's renovation. I could make changes to it that let me use the app better, and I could make those changes without even being in front of a computer, while using the app. Which is a level of control I never had with iOS, and it's something I really enjoy being able to do on the fly while I'm not at home. It's part of the reason I think web apps are going to be a much larger part of the future than dedicated mobile apps. While the rise of custom software is a future many people see, I think the number of apps people download to their phones is going to diminish quite a lot.