Personal Software and the App Store Wall
A thread on 'Software for One', the idea of building apps just for yourself, got a sharp comment that cut to the core problem: Apple and Google are hostile to this model. iOS requires a $99/year developer account just to run your own app on your own phone, and sideloading is still either blocked or deliberately cumbersome. Android is better but not by much in practice.
The comment thread had builders sharing small personal projects: a custom podcast app because PocketCasts lacks two features they want, a CRM rebuilt from a WinForms app in a weekend as a web app. The energy around personal software is real and growing, driven by AI making it faster to build things that fit your exact needs.
The friction is the platform gatekeeping. Web apps sidestep the worst of it, which is probably why several people mentioned building web apps specifically. The irony is that PWAs could solve this, but browser vendors have been inconsistent about supporting the features that would make them feel native.
So what?
The appetite for personal and small-scale software is growing, and AI is making it accessible to people who couldn't write code before. The opportunity for founders is in the tooling layer: platforms, deployment tools, or templates that make it easy to ship something for yourself without fighting app store review processes or paying enterprise developer fees.