Monetizing Apps with AI Innovations

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0:37You can really have it delivered. Or pick it up. Mommy, look! I think your kid is walking up the slide. Really? Auto Trader, buy your car online. Really? With the growth of AI and the industries surrounding it, people thought that the App Store would die because you'd be able to create apps within Claude, OpenAI, things like that. But the App Store has actually been booming as of recently. Today we're gonna talk about why and how you yourself could actually use this to your advantage. Jaden, why don't you tell them about our school community first? Yeah, so if you're interested in making apps to put them on the App Store or any sort of business using AI, I would definitely recommend checking out our AI Hustle school community.

1:16Every single week we share a bonus piece of content on how we're using AI to grow and scale our businesses. And this week specifically we recorded a whole video about how I designed a brand new media company using Claude Design. So it's a great tutorial walkthrough. And in addition to this, we also have tons of videos on how we're vibe coding with different platforms. And I'm about to release my very first vibe coded app to the app store, probably coming out in the next couple of weeks here, a project I've been working on for a while. So if you want to follow along with that, see how we do the marketing, see how we do the growth, see how we do the build out, all of the behind the scenes details we don't share publicly, go join the school community, go check it out.

1:56And our goal is to help you launch, grow and scale your own AI business and make money using AI tools. It's$19 a month. So we made this really cheap. Anyone can get access to it. But it's all the stuff we don't share publicly. So AI Hustle, school community, we'd love for you to be a member. All right. Let's talk about what's going on with the App Store here. And I guess before we kick this off, Jamie, we heard this a lot from a lot of people. But did you subscribe or did you think the App Store was going to die? I mean, I guess I never thought it would die. But, you know, since especially with, you know, Cloud Code and a lot of the new things coming out, I guess I, you know, people are building their own dashboards and apps and things.

2:32A lot of it's becoming, you know, personal. So you don't necessarily need to go buy a simple app or download a simple app when you can basically have it all, you know, on your own device. But I think to people who aren't developers, there's still a huge use for the app store and different tools. And sometimes I get in my own head and I think that everybody is on cloud code all the time making stuff, but they're not. Majority of people. So if you're listening to this episode, you're probably, you know, ahead of 99 % of people. And you're thinking like a developer, an entrepreneur. You're not thinking as much like a consumer.

3:11especially with the development now of Claude Design, Claude Code, people are actually building standalone apps and releasing these tools over on the App Store. And what's interesting is, you know, up until, you know, this beginning of this year, the biggest number of apps released over there were games on the App Store. But there's been a recent surge in other productivity type apps and different tools people are making. Because of all these vibe-coded apps now, there's a lot more being uploaded. And so because of that, there's just a lot more traffic that is coming back to the app store. So pretty cool.

3:44I think this is awesome. All of this data, by the way, comes from App Figures, a great company that puts out data on downloads and all this kind of stuff. I've been following them for a long time. But yeah, if you look at like the charts of app releases over the last couple of years, what you'll notice is, and it's fairly similar in the past, but for 2024, like all four quarters of 2024, there was about 250 ,000 apps released. increased every quarter. So I mean, whatever. And we basically had a very flat line is pretty stable for the entire year. 2025, we started seeing some growth. Q1 of 2025, I think this is when a lot of the tools started getting quite a bit better.

4:23Cloud code started getting a lot better. It started getting more integrated, people started realizing you could build apps and other tools with it. We hit about 300 ,000 in Q1 of 2025. And that was kind of like, it was a big jump going from like very stable for an entire year to boom, 50 ,000 extra apps more grew through 2025 and kind of hit the top at about 360, 370 ,000. And then Q1 of 2026 came along. And we put out almost 500 ,000. So I mean, this is double basically what we were doing in 2024, two years ago, twice as many apps are going out, going from 250 to about 500 ,000. So they're not exact numbers, by the way.

5:07It's like 474 ,000 in Q1 and 240 in Q1 of 2024. But whatever, right? You get the idea. We're almost double here. I mean, this is a massive jump into your point, Jamie, that you mentioned, which is really interesting. These aren't just games. I think so often the industry was just dominated by app games, which I mean, hate to be like the OK Boomer or whatever. But like, basically, that's a waste of time and a waste of collective brainpower for the human race, in my opinion, to just have games and people wasting all their time on mobile games. So that's just me. I'm a dad. You can hate me if you like your mobile games, whatever.

5:43What's really interesting to me is people are building productivity apps. They're building things that are genuinely making their life easier, giving them more data, helping them accomplish things, making them more productive, helping them with work. These are very useful things that are very productive. And so, yeah, for all the people that are like, oh, AI is slop, up. The app store is going to die. Okay, fine. There's going to be apps, but they're all going to be garbage. Like I would argue that we're making a lot more useful things. And I'll just say from my own personal experience. Yeah, I've built I actually haven't pushed any apps to the app store since this whole AI wave, even though I've been like I have an app called self pause on the app store.

6:17It's a it's like a meditation AI kind of meditation app, and positive affirmation app. I made that as my first startup, I made that years ago. It's not something I actively work on. Although now with all the new AI tools, my wife is telling me that she wants to like start doing some work on it and vibe coding on it, which would be cool because we paid people to build that thing from scratch in the olden days. But what's interesting is I haven't pushed any apps out personally in the last couple of years because I've been focused on building AI Box, which lets you build, you know, kind of like these AI generated workflows and web apps and stuff.

6:48But this is definitely something I think I'm going to start focusing on a little bit more in the future because I built so many productivity apps for myself personally and softwares that mostly are web apps that I'm using. And so I think at some point, I'm going to start putting some of those on the app store to make people's lives easier. There's a lot of software that doesn't exist. There's a lot of legacy companies that are so bloated and big. So anyways, this is my spiel for anyone that's like, it's too late. I can't do it, whatever. There's so many companies that are so bloated. They're so slow.

7:17They're not adapting. You can disrupt them majorly with a lot of these tools. And also, I think the strategy that I would take, and I'm curious your thoughts on this, Jamie, the strategy I would take if you're interested in building an app and putting it out, number one, go to the genre of app that you're interested in. So if that's like productivity tools, maybe there's like something you already have that you're already thinking about. If you don't have one, I would say go to the top charts of an industry that you're interested in and look at what's already out there. But anyways, I would say go to the top app in that industry and look at all their one star reviews on their app, all the things people complain about, all the features people complain about, or all the features they wish are there, just go fix all those problems.

7:55Some of these companies are so big, they have, you know, 100 different features they focus on. If you can just get, you know, I think one example of this is I saw like a, I think it was like a stretching app. So there's fitness apps that tell you like your fitness meal plan and how to work out and how to stretch and how to do all this stuff. But sometimes you can just take one of those small areas like stretching specifically, and just make an app just for people that want to stretch. It has all the features. It's the best thing for just that one specific niche use case. And those can do like$100 ,000 a month in revenue on a very small specific niche area.

8:31So yeah, I think find a small, a small vertical, don't make this a huge platform play when you're if this is your first try, do one feature and do it really well. And people will come to you for that. And if you want to add more features, expand from there. But start on a small area, find all the one-star reviews and complaints that your competitors have, fix all those things, and I promise you, you'll be able to get users that are happy that you have fixed those problems. Yeah, I love what you said and kind of your advice comes from a place of actually create something of value and of quality.

9:00Don't try to, like, hack the system and try to come up with, like, some kind of spam app because they will, first of all, they will catch you. And second of all, you will have wasted probably a bunch of credits and a bunch of time. In 2024, Apple said they rejected more than 17 ,000 apps for bait and switch violations. Wow. They rejected 320 ,000 app submissions that were found to be spam, copying other apps, or misleading. And then they also took action to prevent more than 37 ,000 fraudulent apps from reaching users on the App Store. So there's a lot of funny business going on, too. People are trying to take shortcuts.

9:37But I love your advice about, yeah, maybe finding some flaws in existing apps that are really popular, improving upon those. And, you know, obviously there's some marketing things that you'd have to do as well to get your app out there. But I think, like you said, there is a lot of opportunity here and you should definitely be paying attention with some of these programs now like Claude Design, Claude Code. I want to kind of finish on this, but if you were to make an app, is it fairly complex to get it on the app store or is it simple with CloudCode? So if you have CloudCode and CloudCowork, so code obviously can do a lot of the coding, but Cowork can do a lot of like opening up your screen and filling out information and doing settings on like actual the actual websites.

10:20No, it takes you time, but I think literally anyone can build an app. And by the way, just go talk to Cloud Code or Cloud Cowork about how to do it and what you need to do. And it will just explain everything for you. But I think the infrastructure I'm seeing a lot of people use right now, and I actually use this for my first app, Self Pause. It's React Native. It basically builds it in a coding language that can be used for both Android and iOS. So that's something that you can build your whole app once and use that code for both your website, your iOS, and your Android app. It's really nice.

10:52you'll need something probably called Expo to turn it into an actual app but anyways, who cares what solutions I'm talking about here go talk to CloudCode and CloudCowork they will build the whole thing for you, you don't need to know how to be a developer, you don't need to know how to code you have to go set up the original account but CloudCode will tell you or CloudCowork will tell you like, hey go make an Expo account at this website you go to that website, you make an account, you log in and you're like, okay, I'm logged in, it will take control of the account, set up all the settings and do everything for you So to me, I'm like, that is a very low barrier to entry.

11:23If you're good at following instructions, it's not like you have to watch a YouTube tutorial and go and figure out how to click around stuff. That's what I love about Cloud Cowork is, and I actually use, I go back and forth between Cloud Code and Cloud Cowork for stuff. If it's like a big code build out, I'm gonna get Cloud Code to do it. And then I go to Cloud Cowork and I'm like, hey, go test it, make sure everything works. Go set up the database, go whatever I need it. Like, how do I do logins? And it's like, well, you're gonna wanna use Google Authentication. I'm like, okay, go set it up for me.

11:50And sometimes if it needs something, it's like, okay, I have the website open. There's a code on there. I'm not allowed for security purposes to copy it. Copy that code and paste it to me. And I copy and paste it. And it's like, okay, great. And it just like runs crazy building the next thing. So if you're not a developer, 100 % Cloud Cowork and Cloud Code can coach you through building anything. You need to have the vision. You need to have the ideas of what you want to build and the features you want to add. And you can also ask it for good feature ideas beyond that. But I think everyone can build an app.

12:20Nice. Cool. Well, hey, thanks for sharing. I hope that inspires you guys, and I hope you got some value out of this episode. If you did, please leave us a rating or review wherever you're listening. We really appreciate those. They help us reach more people with our content, and we're trying to get to 100 reviews over on Apple Podcasts. So if you're listening there, you extra, I am going to ask you twice to please leave a review because we appreciate those. And don't forget to check out the AI Hustle School community if you want to learn how to use some of these tools, to actually make money online.

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