I’m an indie developer in one of the categories mentioned as being AI heavy (Photo & Video).

I’ve been shipping apps since way before vibe coding (https://heliographe.studio), and it’s been a pretty speedy transition in terms of how the market has shifted in the last 12 months.

Making a high quality camera/photo app used to require a lot of fairly advanced skills: UI design & engineering for the core app, an understanding of signal processing/color transforms/etc for producing the final image, graphics programming to keep everything rendering smooth in the preview (especially if you have advanced features like focus peaking, scopes/histograms, etc)…

It used to be that if you shipped a polished camera app, you would get at least a bit of attention just on those merits.

But in the last year it has become utterly trivial for anyone to make a camera app, and every week there are dozens of new entrants on the market (most of them claim to do their own unique non-AI, film-like processing).

But of those, which has gotten the most attention? I’d argue it’s the just released Chromagraph, designed in part by Rian Johnson of Star Wars fame.

https://www.theverge.com/tech/1025659/rian-johnson-chromagra...

If you compare it to every other camera app released recently, I’d argue it’s pretty average in terms of features/output quality. But that name recognition is what drives downloads more than ever.