Mobile App Bro

I'm dropping stuff on the TL that others like to keep secret or paywalled.

AppStore Veteran.

60+ apps published over the years.

Follow for the juice 🧃

[Mobile App Bro @MobileAppBro]

Anthropic is ultimately just not trustworthy, thats the real issue, and end users were never their priority from the inception of the company.

It was fun, but on to codex we go!

[Mobile App Bro @MobileAppBro]

For anyone using Claude code and experiencing the outrageous limit bug where a few prompts eats up your entire limit very quickly … turns out it wasn’t actually bug but a feature (wtf?)

Generational fumble by Anthropic, with their source code leaked and codex being more than generous. The tides are shifting yet again.

Also it seems like OpenAI might have some optimizations on their inference stack that might turn out to be economically hard to beat for the same level on intelligence.

Just when you thought Anthropic was gonna run away with it all, the war rages on.

[Boris Cherny @bcherny]

Thanks for the feedback.

> Scrollback gutted - session history is barely scrollable. I can't review my own conversation.

can you tell me more about this? how do I repro?

> Rate limits hit harder - prompt caching appears broken since March 23. Sessions that lasted hours now drain in 90 minutes.

prompt caching is working correctly, and we've been shipping optimizations to make it work better. we announced reduced rate limits at peak recently due to our infra being strained because of really fast user growth. we're working around the clock to make this better, and landing improvements every day. please bear with us as we scale up -- it's really hard growing at this scale and we are working as hard as we can to keep up and serve everyone.

> 1M context forced, no opt-out - extra usage required, 200k toggle removed. I didn't ask for this tradeoff.1M context

not quite -- 1m context is free, and does not require extra usage. you can opt out by setting CLAUDE_AUTOCOMPACT_PCT_OVERRIDE=20 to go back to 200k context window

> Opus quality regression - execution bias overrides explicit instructions. The agent pushes into wrong directions constantly. Complex multi-step tasks that worked weeks ago now fail routinely.

we have not changed opus 4.6 since rolling it out. if there's a regression, it's either in claude code, or due to a new memory or CLAUDE.md that your claude is pulling in. to debug, can you run /bug the next time you see this and post the feedback id here?

> Every recent update optimizes for mass adoption. That's great - but the features power users already built themselves now come at the cost of the reliability we depend on. I'm not asking for special treatment. I'm asking: don't make your highest-paying subscribers collateral damage of growth. The tools I've built on Claude Code are my business. When the foundation shifts weekly, that's not iteration - it's instability.

i totally hear you. we want to support both power users and everyone else. recent reliability issues have been a result of completely insane user growth. working as hard as we can to scale up all our services.

next time you hit specific issues, feel free to tag me directly.

[Mobile App Bro @MobileAppBro]

https://t.co/XbFMCS1Izq

[Mobile App Bro @MobileAppBro]

Hate to pick on one of his posts again, but one of the problems in my opinion with consumer apps' revenue velocity is that it makes people think they are geniuses.

Kinda like picking the right coin in a bull market in crypto.

It's intoxicating going from $0 - $500k / mo in a matter of months.

I've been there.

But the problem is people get some success in consumer apps and think they've cracked the da vinci code to business.

Particularly when it comes to an ad arbitrage situation like this one.

As much as I think YC are dinosaurs in this new age.

They give very sage product advice, advice that as much as I hate to admit it, is standing the test of time.

So my take on your take is that you have at present carved a very narrow path through the maze.

Treat is as that, you've found a way to turn meta traffic into money, that's pretty much the bottom line.

And it's a good thing because you are not VC funded which is why this path was the right choice.

But believe it or not, the arbitrage you are experiencing right now will atrophy, the margins with start to crunch, you might even find yourself pulling back on ad spend.

Increasingly your decreasing margins will mean your reliance on renewals and therefore retention will become more important and then what Garry is talking about here will become very relevant.

And because of the volatile forces of consumer, this will be an absolute grind, you only need to read best in class Duolingo's S-1 filing to see.

A LOT of big apps and app studios, that spend on ads, eventually run deficits like you wouldn't believe.

But some of the biggest are willing to wait 2+ years to see payback on their ad spend. That seems to be what happens at scale, at least what I've observed in the industry.

If I were you I would be crafting a plan to sell in the next 1 - 2 years before that happens and you still have a strong growth story.

Otherwise, to hit your $100M goal (with ads specifically, influencer is a different ball game) you will likely need to raise, and I say this as someone who hates the whole funding ecosystem.

You are not the first to do what you are currently doing, and you won't be the last.

For example, I remember seeing this app Reflectly for the first time a few years ago, beautiful app, doing hundred of thousands a month in revenue back when it wasn't as common as it is now, running facebook ads profitably from what I gathered. Featured everywhere and critically acclaimed.

They were pioneers of UGC/micro influencer marketing for apps imo, you can even find talks about it on youtube.

But at some point, they decided to stop running ads I assume.

Why could be anyones guess, I noticed they acquired other apps since so maybe shifted focus.

But my main point is to just stay humble and avoid boxing yourself into wisdom primarily driven by a narrow path and discarding foundational startup wisdom as "useless" and "overrated".

It's a mistake.

[Mobile App Bro @MobileAppBro]

I spoke about this last year about this exact scenario for this exact app. History may not always repeat itself, but it rhymes https://t.co/4h3jjyOmsT

[Ivan Sparrow @ivesparrowai]

It works until it doesn't?

I'm not saying this to gloat.

It's just worth remembering.

This is why you should invest in new ad channels, ops, and new products.

[Mobile App Bro @MobileAppBro]

Very confident and very wrong.

So wrong in fact that I’ll take the opposite.

If apps do in-fact “die” by end of 2027 I will delete my account.

But we both know that isn’t happening, I don’t think people realise how both young and transformative apps as a category are, they don’t just go away like that.

I met someone the other month who runs a food recipe site, that they started 2 years ago, that nets him ~$2 million a year. But I’m pretty sure ‘blogs’ are dead, yet I went down a rabbit hole and found hundreds more like him.

You are totally lost in the sauce, everyone needs to log off x and go to a place with normal human beings.

Most people who use AI, don’t even pay for AI as they currently are! And it’s been years of this, and unless subsidised, most people never even use the latest models.

You might aswell take everything you have and short every public SaaS stock if your conviction is that strong.

[kitze · supermac.io 🐦‍🔥 @thekitze]

@serglotz apps are dead most saas is dead every os will be reinvented from scratch and be fully dynamic and accommodating to users needs in realtime

no one will have and use the same os

if this is not true by the end of 2027 i will delete my account

[Mobile App Bro @MobileAppBro]

A key idea that is lost in all the discourse about AI and what it enables is the simple statistical idea of just basic gaussian a.k.a normal distribution.

A lot of the takes rely basically on human behaviour completely shifting such that more people suddenly have the agency and willingness to do things.

Most people will distribute around the average, meaning it will STILL be just a small percentage of people that will actually utilize AI in all the way people are theorising now.

And no, not EVERYONE is going to want to build their own app. In fact I would wager that the same number of people who attempt to build their own app now will be roughly be the same ultimately beyond the novelty phase.

Think about this, we can all cook, we all have our own cooking facilities in all our own homes. We have multiple way to make food faster than ever before, microwaves, air fryers, rice cookers e.t.c the list goes on. We've got complete meals that can be ready in a few minutes.

Yet the restaurant industry continues to thrive, with new restaurants popping up everyday, they werent wiped off the face of the planet the moment we could cook our own food in our own homes with increasingly advanced technology.

This is why I think the concept of "apps", essentially concentrated/focused utility, as far as im concerned will always exist, but perhaps in a different form.

[Mobile App Bro @MobileAppBro]

Another ‘apps are dead’ post. This is a psychosis, apps will definitely exist next year, in fact I would wager we are about to see all time highs in the industry revenue wise for the next couple of years.

This type of thinking of why no one dared compete with myfitnesspal till some teenagers, with boundless optimism, built Cal AI that just did $5m last month. (!)

I’m pretty sure most people thought building calorie tracking apps was a fools errand, and that segment of the market was defacto dead

[kitze · supermac.io 🐦‍🔥 @thekitze]

stop charging subscriptions for your apps. apps won't exist next year anyway. do lifetime payments. which means "until january 2027" ✌️

[Mobile App Bro @MobileAppBro]

The sheer number of times I’ve seen this statement over the last decade is comical, of all the times in the world, apps are definitively the least dead they have ever been right now.

And I’m usually more inclined to be pessimistic but in fact we’ve entered a new renaissance the likes we haven’t seen since the beginning of the AppStore itself.

He might eventually be right like predicting the fall of the American empire, but probably for the next couple of years, you could get into apps and change your life forever in a relatively short period of time compared to almost any other industry, with extremely low overhead, and that to me is the furthest thing from dead.

[Peter Steinberger 🦞 @steipete]

apps are dead

[Mobile App Bro @MobileAppBro]

Yes I do know, i've been making apps (the hard way) for a long time and I can confidently say the maintenance is easier that its ever been is my point. Its gotten to the point where I just pipe crash data, user bugs and feedback directly into an army of subagents that all compete to find the best solution to an issue.

And then not only that with things like XcodeBuild MCP, can get the agent to the actually test the solutions directly in simulator.

You can get agents to simulate behaviour or data set ups that cause issues. You can get agents to simulate what happens at scale. You can ask agent to embody different persona types and how they would use your app and what issues or confusion they could encounter. You can get agents to simulate things that would have been tedious and hard to do when debugging before.

imo the maintenance is easier than the making of the app, the problems are narrowed and scoped with very clear objectives. Where as a lot can go wrong at the foundation.

The energy you are talking about is now extremely leveraged to the highest degree in history. Updates that would take me 2+ weeks to get ready take me an afternoon, and I can be working on 5 of these at any one time across different apps in parallel, just firing off prompts one after another while the other works.

You can then get one agent to get another agent from a different lab like codex, gemini, anthropic e.t.c to check and code review its code to find any gaps or vulnerabilities.

Think about that kind of leverage.

You just have to lean into it and realise you exist in a different paradigm now, discard your old ways of thinking, and think different.

[farz @iamhtml]

@MobileAppBro Making the app is not the bottle neck. It’s the maintenance. Since you already have an app. You must know the energy it takes to make it perform.

It’s not a technical limitation.

[Mobile App Bro @MobileAppBro]

Everybody praising this post but I just couldn’t take it seriously when I saw “take the VC money” sounds like reverse justification, he took the VC money now he’s telling you to.

This is probably the worst time in history to put that as top advice when you can do so much with so little, and B2C consumer is one of the only places where you can really do this at scale

Also make one app not 10 only works in a world without increasingly smart agents, this is already ancient advice imo, would have agreed with him this time last year but the meta has moved.

Lean into the leverage of intelligence. It’s like in the Industrial Revolution saying don’t make 10 steam engines, just make 1, sure, but we got factories now that in the right hands can make 10 of them with a level of consistency not possible in the history of the world. You just shoot off prompts, to get something shipped, then use user feedback as more prompts to improve the product. You can easily manage 10s of apps, if you disagree with me then you fundamentally don’t really believe AI agents have changed anything or are ever going to get smarter than they already are.

It will take a little while before our minds adjust to the age of intelligence and what it really means to have intelligent agents at our disposal.

Apps being worthless is also completely wrong imo, margins will crunch but like any commoditised item, money will still be made, especially in the niches.

For as long as bread has been available and knowledge of how to make it commoditised, people are still making money from bread till this day. Many in different forms to its original forms, but money will always be made.

This is his strategy disguised as advice but really he’s just laying out what he’s decided to do. But unless you want to go his path, take the VC money and have to grow at all costs, then fire up your agents and have a party.

You don’t need anything ‘generational’ you need something ‘profitable’ to change your life.

[Koby Conrad 🌻 @kobyjconrad]

https://t.co/LfaNaHeN9i

[Mobile App Bro @MobileAppBro]

There are also way more apps that don't make money than those than do, this doesn't make any sense.

This is probably the worst advice for 99% of all app creators.

No different to VC vs lifestyle business debate. Sure if you can somehow manage to get the scale required to make freemium work then thats great, but the graveyard of freemium is vast, wide and much deeper than this post would suggest.

Maybe if everyone was as good as you, but most are not.

Making something freemium will seldom actually lead to real growth without luck, investment or painstaking work and attention to your K factor.

But I can guarantee you that for more freemium apps, a hard paywall can change your economics almost literally overnight with just that one change.

And when MOST apps DON'T make money, the inverse advice to this I feel like is the most useful.

Hard paywall feels like the true contrarian advice imo.

[Hunter J. Isaacson @hunterjisaacson]

There are way more apps WITHOUT a hard paywall used by millions of people than anything with a hard paywall

Don’t sacrifice growth for a few bucks

[Mobile App Bro @MobileAppBro]

@andrewxroas How's the other new app you launched doing? Don't think I've seen you post any new updates on it

[Mobile App Bro @MobileAppBro]

@jakemor Until I can simply prompt to create any of these screens/sequence, then i'm afraid this just looks like more work, we are in a different era now.

WYSIWYG must be augmented with AI imo

[Mobile App Bro @MobileAppBro]

@andrewxroas How you finding whop vs stripe?

[Mobile App Bro @MobileAppBro]

I'm actually very much impressed by your response and how you've handled my criticism.

Humility is a rare thing in the consumer app space.

I half expected you to just block me & move on.

So kudos to you for engaging earnestly, self reflecting and while still making your point

🫡

[Mobile App Bro @MobileAppBro]

Yes but somehow building a business off creating dozens of 'fake' accounts that pretend to be organic selling products to unsuspecting consumers is GOOD?

Im not even hating, I literally do it myself all day long, but I wont pretend to have some kind of moral authority here.

Mine are even worse because a lot of them are not even real humans, so at least you've got that!

But for example your agency has marketed those astrology 'draw your soulmate' apps which is equally as dumb as dih in my opinion.

The case study you guys posted even says:

"People constantly worry about questions like - ‘Who will be my soulmate’, ‘How will I find them’, ‘what are the signs’. They look for answers on blogs, video essays, books, etc...."

another case study said:

"The "toxic partner you subconsciously crave" angle taps into uncomfortable self-awareness that viewers can't ignore. This psychological trigger promises hidden truths about behavior patterns, making people engage despite discomfort."

So even there you understand that you are essentially preying on peoples insecurities yourself in how you came up with your strategies to market the apps.

I was just scrolling through more of your case studies and you've marketed a feet finder app, ai companion apps... anyways I actually don't care.

Just get off your high horse, quit the virtue signalling on here and let the free market decide.

[Julia Pintar @juliapintar]

just because you can make something that brings in cash doesn't mean you should

we do have a responsibility to actually provide GOOD into the world - not just pray on people's insecurities

you can literally build & distribute anything you want. make it count

[Mobile App Bro @MobileAppBro]

Fair enough that it isn't your case studies, but I couldn't tell the difference as just a casual observer, and putting it on your website is the same thing in a way because you are associating them with your brand either way.

Plus without even looking into it that deep into your list I can assume one of your case studies 'Recent Follow' isn't exactly free from the same insecurity based marketing when the first example I see is the caption in the image below.

Pretty sure this apps entire premise preys on insecurity, and even more so when these scenarios are not even real, they are just deliberately structured in a way to create the kind of scenario that evokes the emotion necessary for users to engage with it.

In this case it will be just pure insecurity about who their partner has recently followed. The content doesn't even depict a real scenario, and I'm not sure if its necessarily making the world a better place

At the end of the day, you like many of us exist in a gray area.

Im not mad at it because relative to all the things you can do that are shady in the world, apps to me just rank so low, especially when such a small fraction of users pay anyway.

Anyone who can remember the early days of the AppStore will know that this industry was essentially founded on the dumbest apps imaginable.

So if someone wants to make something stupid and people want to pay, let the market do its thing.

[Mobile App Bro @MobileAppBro]

@andrew48x I am also curious about your ad formats. Are you able to give any insight into them ofcourse without revealing your actual product, maybe reference ads in a completely different niche that are similar.

Or perhaps a breakdown of formats that you’ve tested and what’s worked.