What does this even mean?
Gone are the days when only the talented could create apps and ship to millions. With each passing day, the “normies” are just as empowered with the tools to create such applications with just little to no coding skills. The profitability arbitrage of “shipping to millions” will now proceed to decrease as more and more people become “eligible” to build their own apps thanks to Generative AI.
This, I predict would give rise to what I call homemade software. This is probably analogous to what 3D printing is today. People could just print their own utility objects for their own unique use case. Average consumers with a 3D printer are printing broken knobs for their hobtops, custom shelving, so on and so forth that cannot be imagined to be a big enough “market” for conventional manufacturers to even try supplying.
This isn’t a bad thing. You don’t have to wait for a big company to make the software you need. If you’re wishing this existed, you could just build it yourself. AI lets you fill in the gaps in your knowledge while open source gives you the advantage of standing on the shoulders of giants. Leveraging both it is possible to cap every little pain point that you might have in your unique life, and if the problem is popular, then even better! You could sell this software to them and make a couple of bucks.
While it is no longer possible to be able to ship to millions and achieve market capitalization like the big boy companies out of SF anymore, it is now possible to solve even the littlest of problems that bug you in your daily digital life. Like my project should-be-studying - an app I had to build it myself to fit my own unique use case. There is more little opportunities to solve, and hopefully, add up enough of them and you could probably make a living.