no one saw what APPLE just did...

So, Apple really doesn't like this AI thing. It kind of seems that they keep betting against it. They put out a paper called the illusion of thinking. We covered that on this channel. There's a lot of things wrong with that paper. They tried to coin the term AI for Apple intelligence. And they still don't have an AI model capable of doing anything. But recently, they started cracking down on vibe coding apps. So, what happened? Apple is blocking updates to popular apps like Replet and Vibe Code. This according to Apple, these aren't new rules that they've invented. These are old rules that they're only now enforcing. So, first of all, what is vibe coding? In case you're not familiar with the term, it was coined by Andre Karpathy, ex Tesla, ex OpenAI, and AI researcher. And the idea is simple. You just describe what you want in plain simple English. And AI codes up that thing for you. So, the AI generates the entire app. So, there's no coding knowledge required. a non-developer can say, "Hey, make me this calorie tracking app and receive a working calorie tracking app. " And Vivecoin has been blowing up in 2025 and 2026. Interestingly, across both developers and non-developers, there's quite a few people that are really interested in this new approach to creating software. And we've seen tons of different platforms for this. We have Replet, VCode, Versel, VO, OpenAI, Codeex, Cursor. Corser, by the way, released their very own AI model, I think, just within the last 24 hours, and it's uh surprisingly good. And Vibe Code is an interesting project. It's by Riley Brown. So, he's the co-founder of Vibe Code. He's probably one of the biggest names for Vibe Coding on the internet. He's on YouTube, Instagram, Tik Tok, tons of followers. I mean, when you search Vibe Coding on YouTube, he's probably like the number one person that comes up. And we've covered his app on his channel. It's a good interface. He's sponsored a segment, but I've also talked about it, you know, organically before that as well. You describe your idea for the app. The AI builds it. Currently, I believe they're running Opus 4. 6. And this thing handles the front end, the back end, the payments, and the deployment of the actual app. And they actually help you publish it on the App Store. And this app is mobile first. It's on the iOS, it's on Android, and now this app is directly in Apple's crosshair. Again, we're talking mainly about Vibe Code and Replet. Those are the two that Apple's cracking down on right now. So, what is Apple doing? They're not allowing any new updates since like January or February of this year. The apps still work, but they can't push any new updates. So, they're stuck in the review limbo. So, the question is why? Well, there's the official version that Apple gives. There's also kind of the historical battle between people that wanted to publish on the App Store and Apple. a lot of what some consider you know anti-competitive behavior but now I think more and more it's becoming clear that AI is changing the game so let's kind of unpack what's happening so first of all app store has a certain guidelines been around for a while guideline 2. 5. 2 Two, apps must be self-contained and cannot download, install, or execute code that changes their own functionality or that of other apps. So, it can't be an app that just keeps downloading more code and morphing into something different. So, it kind of makes sense that you want to avoid that because once it passes the review process, you don't want it changing into something else. And the developer program license 3. 3. 1b downloaded interpreted code cannot alter the app's primary purpose. And so, Apple is maintaining that this is not because of Vibe coding. This is not new. This is something from the past and they're just sort of enforcing these rules for these particular apps. And certainly that makes sense because with Vibe Code the app, I mean, if you think about it, if you can code up any app, then you can have like any app within that app, right? So, you download the Vibe Code app and then any other app you want instead of, you know, downloading it from the app store, you can actually vibe code it within that. It could be anything you want. So, you've effectively completely bypassed Apple's guidelines, their review process. So, I guess it kind of does make sense and I'm sure some people will be defending Apple saying, you know, it's just doing what it's supposed to do. Here's the problem. In the past, we've seen this behavior before and we've kind of seen how it ends. So, for example, with the WeChat mini apps. So, we had Tencent that allowed third party companies to launch mini apps within WeChat. So, this effectively bypasses Apple's commission, right? So, so it doesn't need to go through Apple. It happens within the app. And so Apple held up WeChat updates for years, right? So kind of similar to what we're seeing potentially here. Here's been a few months. WeChat has been held up for years. And interestingly, just last year, they struck a deal. Apple takes 15% of the payments inside WeChat mini apps, right? So this standoff, this enforcement of these rules, how did it end? Well, it ended with a revenue share, right? So WeChat, Tensent, they had to pony up and pay Apple. Also in 2020, we had of course Epic Games, right? They had this massive lawsuit against Apple over the 30% fee that Apple was charging for any purchases. So, Epic alleged anti-competitive behavior. Fortnite, as far as I know, is still not on the iOS store. Epic, unfortunately, or

fortunately, unfortunately, depending on how you see it, they did lose the battle, but they did gain the right to inform their users of alternative payment methods that were outside of the Apple ecosystem. And in 2025, EU fined Apple 500 million euros for various app store violations and kind of taking the app developers rights to steer customers to make purchases outside of the app store, right? So Apple wants to keep everybody on the app store, no knowledge of the outside world, like you can only purchase through the Apple ecos. So Gene Burus, who's a former Spotify lawyer, he fought Apple on a number of these cases and now works for the Coalition for App Fairness. He's saying Apple has a history of not allowing apps or features that might create competition on their platform. These vibe coding apps might open the door to competition that Apple doesn't want on their platform. Okay. So, their stance is, well, we're just enforcing the rules that we've had all along. But if you look at the history, it's all about the money. It's all about keeping the customers, the Apple users within the gated community, that is the Apple ecosystem, so that they can collect money and fees from them and make sure they're getting their cut off of any app that is on the Apple App Store. What I believe is happening, why Apple is actually doing this is number one, it's a threat to their app store revenue. So, VIP coding apps don't just help people build apps on their phones, they phones that completely bypass Apple, you know, the app store entirely. So those apps don't pay Apple's 15 to 30% commission fees. Also, Vibe Coding could accelerate the shift from, you know, the app store, the mobile apps to web apps, which is the single biggest threat long-term to Apple's service revenue. So Apple's business is one side of the hardware, so that's like 300 billion, and one side is services. That's 100 billion or thereabouts. And so the app store commission is a chunk from the services side. So in terms of the revenue it might not be a huge percentage 6 to 7% of Apple's total annual revenue but I think in terms of profitability if you think about it I mean that's a highly profitable the margins are phenomenal. So while it's like 6 to 7% of their actual revenues it's probably like a quarter of the profit. I don't think that's out of the ballpark. You know the app store commissions could be I think a quarter of the actual profits that Apple as a company brings in. Tell me if you think I'm wrong. They don't actually separate the services into how much of it coming is coming from the app store versus other things. But I wouldn't be surprised if it's let's call it 20 to 25% of all the profit that they're bringing in. So if people can just create apps and host them on whatever websites, which a lot of these apps allow you to just host on a website where anybody can use it. I mean, if you think about it, that is a pretty big long-term threat to how Apple makes their money. Not only that, but they're now getting hit with a flood of these vibecoded apps. And if you look at places like Reddit where iOS developers share information, some of them are vibe coders, but just iOS developers that have been there for a while. They're referring to this as, you know, the app store being flooded. So week after week, there's more and more submissions to the App Store. We're approaching something like 3,000 new apps every single day. That's over 1 million of apps per year. The App Store in total has something like 2. 2 million apps. And this is after Apple's has been progressively pruning some of the lower quality submissions. So the total up until today number of apps that it has is to a million and now we're on track to hit a million new submissions per year and that's just growing and growing over time. And Apple's own review team is slowing down. Developers are reporting that it's just taking longer and longer to get things approved. So as you can imagine, Vibe coding is a problem for Apple on kind of a lot of different fronts. Now, of course, for every good app, you're going to have people that are submitting lowquality, quickly coded submissions. So, there's a lot more, you know, spam, a lot more crap out there potentially. And the flooding of apps, it's slowing down the review process for everyone involved. But over time, as there are more and more good, highquality apps, that might slowly start chipping away at Apple's commissionbased Apple Store business. Because if you're able to create an app that has no ads, no payments, is customtailor made for you that's available on any browser and it's absolutely free. Maybe you made yourself specifically for your use case. You're going to use that over anything in the app store. And also it's a threat to Xcode. So Xcode is Apple's own developer tool. And so as you can imagine these Vive coding apps, they're a threat to Xcode, right? Because you can bypass Xcode entirely. Just create it with whatever language you want. Vive coding apps. Here's an important thing to understand. Guess what Apple added to Xcode just recently. Can you guess? Yes, it is Vibe coding features or you know AI coding assistance powered by models from OpenAI and Anthropic. So the same models that are building the apps on VIP the VIP code app are the same

models that are now powering Xcode, Apple's own developer service product. So, just to be clear, Apple is building their own AI developing tools while blocking competing AI developer tools from appearing on the app store. I'm not saying those two things are related. I wouldn't want to get in trouble. I'm just saying that they they're happening at the same time, and I'm sure it's just a coincidence, but some developers do say that Apple strongly prefers that developers use Xcode because that makes it harder to switch to competing platform. So, by the way, really fast, this is Riley Brown. So he is the person behind the Vibe Code app. So that's the number one full stack Vibe coding platform and he retweeted a tweet by Tim Sweeney saying I like this guy. So Tim Sweeney, this is the Epic Games founder and CEO. So Epic Games, you know, this is the guy. And Tim is saying, so by the way, he's retweeting my little post about this um Apple situation. And he's saying Apple needs to bring back Steve Waznjak to fix these idiotic missteps. You know what? I like this guy, too. I gotta say, I agree with Riley here. Uh, this is a good guy, Tim Sweeney. He's saying it's not only a terrible move against developers, it's a move against kids learning to make apps and therefore a move against the future of Apple's own platform. This is true. I've said this before, but in game theory, there's a definition for the word stupid or stupidity. That is when you take certain actions that bring you no benefits and perhaps hurt someone else. So if it's hurting somebody else, it's not bringing you any benefit. Maybe it's even hurting yourself. That's kind of the definition of stupidity in game theory. So here, Apple is hurting developers, right? So it's making it harder for developers to create great apps for the app store. And it's a move against kids who are learning to make apps and therefore a move against the future of Apple's own platform. I didn't even think about that, but 10 years, 20 years from now, the developers are going to be people that are kids today. How are kids that are alive today that are growing up today, do you know how they're going to be learning to code? You think code with zero AI assistance? I think the chance of that is zero. They're going to be using vibe coding to at least start learning. Hopefully, they're also going to be learning the foundational skills, everything else. But whatever the case is, they're going to have some AI assistance. Maybe it's as a tutor or a code completion or completely kind of a vibe coded where they're just speaking it into existence. We'll see. But once again, it seems like Apple is shooting itself in the foot when it comes to AI. They're just they're not seeing where this is going. Two, three decades ago to be a photographer that was kind of a career path, right? You had to know how to develop film, use the f-stop, the ISO settings on your camera. You had to, you know, it was like a career. Then digital cameras came out. And first of all, the number of pictures taken around the world blew up into the trillions. And think about who's taking most of the pictures. It's not necessarily people that are employed as photographers. It's kids, college kids, high school kids, people that have a lot of time, who's going to be vi coding the stuff 10, 20 years in the future, potentially a lot sooner. It's people that are kids and in the future it's going to be kids that are going to be vi coding whatever they want. These are the future users of Apple products and Apple is just like blocking them and preventing them from doing the thing that, you know, is going to be happening, the thing that is rapidly picking up steam. It seems like a very short-term view, like let's save our business. Let's save these dollars in our revenue instead of thinking what's going to happen over the next decade or two. So, Riley commented on the expos that I did saying that they're in the process of getting this fixed. So, they have some ideas. They're saying that this is going to get fixed. And I know it will. I have no doubt that they're going to figure this stuff out. That's kind of like that entrepreneurial spirit. I wish them the best. Hopefully, this is not going to cause too many issues for them. But it's still very frustrating because what Apple is doing seems backwards. So first of all, you know, this is going to cause a PR nightmare and potentially an antirust trigger of some sort. So various regulators are already watching Apple very closely both here in the states as well as the EU. Finding various US tech companies is where EU gets a lot of their tax base from. I'm slightly kidding, but it's true that the EU makes more in fines by finding US tech companies than from the income tax of all the EUbased tech companies. So, you know, they're just lying and waiting for one of these companies, especially one as sort of cashrich as Apple to make some mistake that they're going to be to find it. And certainly, this seems like it could be it. So, as you can see, Apple's kind of in a bind, right? So, this is going to be a PR disaster. probably might probably maybe might get them a fine. But you also kind of realize that from their perspective, they are seeing this as a potentially big and credible threat to the entire ecosystem to their biggest profit drive. Not their biggest, but a huge chunk of the thing that drives so much of their profit. And of course, they can't just outright ban these apps. That would be

even worse. So by enforcing these old kind of technical gotcha rules, that's kind of like the middle path. So it's illegally defensible. it doesn't ban the apps outright and it's very effective at actually slowing down the competitors and trying to kind of like just slowing down to prevent them from gaining traction and this is a battle that Apple has been slowly losing for years now. So, we'll kind of see what happens here. It's kind of annoying because you know this is coming at the expense of some of the people here in this little AI ecosystem, AI community that uh we all love. I hope you like it and love it as much as I do. It's also one of those things where these large companies with more money than God, as the expression goes, where they're making some pretty crappy decisions in order to protect short-term kind of their revenues that hurt innovation, that hurt users and consumers, and it's not going to prevent technology from progressing. They can't. Again, Apple doesn't really have any AI models. I mean, technically, they do. They do have their own AI models, but notice that they're not on any benchmark you've ever seen because they're kind of useless. For years, Google was paying Apple to be the default search engine on Apple devices, but now the tides are shifting, and now Apple is beginning to pay Google billions of dollars to use Gemini as their AI model. So, Apple still made more from Google paying it, but the tides might be shifting. So, we'll see how things look in 5 to 10 years from now. But whatever the case is, I hope Apple kind of realizes where things are going that they can't prevent this wave, this flood of vibe coding apps and in fact the AI revolution, AI progress coming in general and hopefully they figure out how to adapt and integrate this into Apple as a company, Apple as a whole. So let me know what you think. I know a lot of you use Apple like Apple. Am I off here? Is this completely unfair for me to be blaming Apple for doing this, saying that this is not cool? Let me know in the comments if you made it this far. Thank you so much for watching. My name's Wes Roth. See you in the next