Apple’s vibe coding crackdown just led to a surprising workaround

Apple removed Anything, a popular vibe coding app, from the App Store, and the startup’s response was not to go quietly.

The team announced on X that it had moved app building to iMessage instead, calling the new tool “Text to App” and billing it as the first iMessage app builder. The post racked up 2 million views within hours of going up.

Vibe coding, for anyone unfamiliar, is basically building apps by describing what you want in plain language and letting AI handle the actual code. There’s no “traditional” programming required.

According to one of the founders on X, the team saw iMessage as “another open platform” after losing their App Store listing. Marcus Lowe, another founder of the company, said Anything is one of many vibe coding apps Apple has blocked or removed in recent weeks, framing the iMessage move as a direct response to that pressure.

For now, reactions to the announcement seem to be somewhat mixed.

A lot of people found it genuinely funny. Jasper Cannon on X called it “genuinely the funniest possible thing they could have done,” and Charly Wargnier called it “the most elegant middle finger” he had ever seen.

Others were more skeptical. One reply on the original thread noted that moving to iMessage to escape Apple’s control is a bit like hiding from your landlord in their basement. Another user warned the team not to poke the bear. Apple could easily flag them through iMessage’s own scam detection if it wanted to.

Apple’s App Store review process has already been a sore point for developers lately, as many speculated that the vibe-coded apps might be hogging up the review pipeline.

Whether the iMessage version sidesteps that problem or just runs into a different version of it is not clear yet.

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