Multiple Australian outlets report that app marketplaces are seeing a sharp rise in new app launches in early 2026, driven in part by “vibe-coding” and other AI-assisted app creation tools. The Brisbane Times, Sydney Morning Herald, and The Age (Melbourne) all cite that in the first half of 2026 there are as many new apps launched on the App Store as there were across all of 2025. The articles characterize a significant portion of these new releases as low-quality, including apps described as “AI-made slop.”
While the reports focus on concerns about volume and quality, they present the same core observation: the pace of new app publishing has increased dramatically within a short period. Across the sources, there is no single detailed breakdown of which specific developers or categories are responsible, nor do the articles provide quantified measures of how many apps are definitively AI-generated versus human-made. Instead, they emphasize the overall trend of rapid app proliferation and the prevalence of AI-assisted creation methods among the new uploads during the period covered.
