The App Store's Subscription Model Is Collapsing Under AI Clones

The math is simple: if it costs almost nothing to build an app, it costs almost nothing to clone an app. And if cloning is free, subscription pricing dies.

We're already seeing this play out in the numbers. Apple's App Store got 557K new submissions in 2025, up 24% from 2024 (source: Appfigures). That's not because people suddenly got more creative. It's because building an app went from a $50K project to a weekend with Claude.

What happens to pricing

For apps that run locally—no servers, no cloud costs—subscriptions make no sense anymore. The only real cost is development, and that's becoming negligible. If someone charges $10/month for a local PDF editor, someone else will build a clone for $5 one-time. Then someone will make it free.

Apps that need servers (sync, AI features, storage) will still have subscriptions, but the price will drop to barely above cost. Same logic applies: easy to copy means no pricing power.

Apple isn't fighting this

I thought Apple would tighten App Store review to slow down the flood of apps. Instead they put Claude in Xcode. They're not just okay with AI-generated apps—they're actively supporting it.

The revenue numbers back this up. App Store grew 11% in 2025, Google Play 5%. There's still tons of unmet demand, especially for niche use cases that were never worth building before. Lower development costs mean these niches finally get served.

Developer perspective

This sucks for developers trying to make a living from apps. The competitive pressure is going to be brutal. But for users? It's great. People have been complaining about app subscription costs for years. There's that old complaint: "Why do I have to keep paying for software after I already paid $1000 for my iPhone?" That might actually become reality now.