Dedicated mobile apps for vibe coding have so far failed to gain traction

While many vibe coding startups have become unicorns, with valuations in the billions, one area where AI-assisted coding has not yet taken off is on mobile devices. Despite the numerous apps now available that offer vibe coding tools on mobile platforms, none are gaining noticeable downloads, and few are generating any revenue at all.

According to an analysis of global app store trends by the app intelligence provider Appfigures, only a small handful of mobile apps offering vibe coding tools have seen any downloads, let alone generated revenue.

The largest of these is Instance: AI App Builder, which has seen only 16,000 downloads and $1,000 in consumer spending. The next largest app, Vibe Studio, has pulled in just 4,000 downloads but has made no money.

This situation could still change, of course. The market is young, and vibe coding apps continue to improve and work out the bugs.

New apps in this space are arriving all the time, too. This year, a startup called Vibecode launched with $9.4 million in seed funding from Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian’s Seven Seven Six. The company’s service allows users to create mobile apps using AI within its own iOS app. Vibecode is so new, Appfigures doesn’t yet have data on it.

For now, most people who want to toy around with vibe coding technology are doing so on the desktop. But vibe coding does have another presence on mobile devices: it’s powering a growing number of existing mobile apps.

For instance, the subscription platform provider RevenueCat, now used by over 50,000 apps, reports that it powers the in-app purchases for over 50% of all AI-built iOS apps currently on the market.

The company told TechCrunch that the share of apps that came to RevenueCat for monetization from an AI assistant or platform — meaning an AI chatbot referred its service to the customer — surged to over 35% of all new signups in the second quarter of this year, up from below 5% in the second quarter of last year.

The platform, which is already used by nearly 50% of all mobile apps that take payments, notes that vibe coders are using its service to automatically configure their subscriptions with Cursor, Claude Code, and others, via its RevenueCat MCP server, allowing them to quickly create subscriptions and test plans and features.

Although there’s certainly interest in vibe coding, the consensus is that it’s not ready for prime time.

TechCrunch recently spoke with developers working with AI-generated code, who said the technology still has a long way to go. A separate survey from Fastly found that roughly 95% of the nearly 800 developers surveyed said they had to spend extra time fixing AI-generated code.

Still, user demand is there. A 2025 survey by Stack Overflow found that 84% of respondents are using or planning to use AI tools in their development process, up from 76% last year. Another survey conducted this summer by the tech media site The Information found that 75% of respondents were at least trying vibe coding. A May 2025 study by the software intelligence platform Jellyfish found that 90% had integrated AI into their work, up from 61% last year, as reported by Business Insider.