It took Rebecca Yu seven days to vibe code her dining app. She was tired of the decision fatigue that comes from people in a group chat not being able to decide where to eat.
Armed with determination, Claude, and ChatGPT, Yu decided to just build a dining app from scratch — one that would recommend restaurants to her and her friends based on their shared interests.
“Once vibe-coding apps emerged, I started hearing about people with no tech backgrounds successfully building their own apps,” she told TechCrunch. “When I had a week off before school started, I decided it was the perfect time to finally build my application.”
So, she created the web app Where2Eat to help her and her friends find a place to eat.
Yu is part of the growing trend of people who, due to rapid advancements in AI technology, can easily build their own apps for personal use. Most are coding web applications, though they are also increasingly vibe coding mobile apps intended to run only on their own personal phones and devices. Some who are already registered as Apple developers are leaving their personal apps in beta on TestFlight.
It is a new era of app creation that is sometimes called micro apps, personal apps, or fleeting apps because they are intended to be used only by the creator (or the creator plus a select few other people) and only for as long as the creator wants to keep the app. They are not intended for wide distribution or sale.
For example, founder Jordi Amat told TechCrunch that he built a fleeting web gaming app for his family to play over the holidays and simply shut it down once the vacation was over.
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Then there’s Shamillah Bankiya, a partner at Dawn Capital, who is building a podcast translation web app for personal use. Interestingly enough, Darrell Etherington, a former TechCrunch writer, now a vice president at SBS Comms, is also building his own personal podcast translation app. “A lot of people I know are using Claude Code, Replit, Bolt, and Lovable to build apps for specific use cases,” he said.
One artist told TechCrunch that he built a “vice tracker” for himself to see how many hookahs and drinks he was consuming each weekend.
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