Google launched Playground on October 7, a browser platform where adults in the United States type a game idea and get something playable back. By the company’s own description, it is an early experiment. It is also the newest entry in a category that has already changed how much software gets made: tools that let people with no engineering background build products. The numbers coming out of app stores suggest that making a thing has become the easy half of the job, and the hard half falls hardest on solo founders and small agencies, including India’s, who are now entering this market.
Playground itself is simple to describe. It is open only to US users aged 18 and over for now, and Google has said more countries will follow without naming any, Dataconomy reports.
Playground itself is simple to describe. Playing is free at playground.google, while creating, draws on a weekly token allowance that grows with a Google One AI subscription. Finished games can go out as a link or into a community gallery, which Unite.AI reports is ranked using player ratings and play activity. In other words, an algorithm decides which games anyone sees.
Playground is not alone
The field is already crowded. Forbes lists Cursor, Replit, Bolt and Lovable among the AI tools that let a first-time developer ship an app over a weekend. The Information, working from Sensor Tower data, points to Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex as the main drivers of the App Store surge, since they let non-programmers turn written prompts into working apps.
Emergent goes further, generating the frontend, backend, database, sign-in, payments, and deployment from a text prompt. For games specifically, Google and Unity said in a joint statement that a product called Spark will launch later this year.
Platforms are pushing back on some of it. 9to5Mac reports that Apple has pulled or blocked updates to vibe-coding apps, including Anything and Replit, on the grounds that they generate code that changes what an app does after review.
The supply is already visible
Apple’s App Store offers the clearest early read. Appfigures counted 557,000 new apps submitted in 2025, a 24% jump and the highest yearly volume since 2016, according to Forbes. Sensor Tower’s count, as reported by The Information, is higher still: growth of 30% to nearly 600,000 apps. The two trackers measure differently, but they agree on direction. The Information also reported an 84% jump in new apps in a single quarter this year.
The same thing is happening in music. Deezer said on July 21 that it was receiving about 90,000 fully AI-generated tracks a day, more than half of all new uploads at the June peak, up from roughly 10,000 a day when it began tracking in January 2025. Those tracks drew only 1% to 3% of streams, the company added.
Where the money goes
More products have not meant more winners. Sensor Tower’s State of Mobile 2026 report found that the top 1% of apps earned 92.2% of in-app purchase revenue in 2025: $154 billion, against $13.1 billion split among everyone else. Developer Cynthia Awuzie was blunter on X, as quoted by Forbes: “This is peak AI spam on the App Store.”
AI apps have a particular problem. RevenueCat‘s State of Subscription Apps 2026, built on more than 115,000 apps and $16 billion in revenue, found they earn 41% more per paying customer but churn 30% faster. After twelve months, 21.1% of annual AI subscribers are still paying, against 30.7% for other apps. People will try an AI product. Keeping them is a different matter.
Free traffic is narrowing
A Pew Research Center study of 900 US adults, covering March 2025, found people clicked a regular search result in 8% of visits when Google showed an AI summary, versus 15% when it did not. Links inside the summaries drew clicks in just 1% of visits. The data is more than a year old and US-only, but it is a clean measurement of how search, a channel new products lean on, is changing.
What this means for India’s builders
Indian founders are on both sides of this. Emergent, which describes itself as one of the fastest-scaling technology startups in India by revenue, raised $70 million in a round led by Khosla Ventures and SoftBank. The company said it reached $50 million in annual recurring revenue within seven months of starting and was on track to pass $100 million by April 2026. The money is flowing, at least for now, to the companies selling the tools. Whether it reaches the people using them is less certain.
The consequence for small agencies and solo founders is uncomfortable. If a client can generate a landing page or a basic tool in a weekend, “we will build it for you” stops being a pitch. What remains is an audience, a reputation, and a reason for people to trust one product over the nine near-identical ones beside it. That is analysis, not a finding from any one study. But every figure above points the same way.
The case against pessimism
Not everyone is drowning. Developer Robert Boehme told X users, per Forbes, that his apps clear review in three to four days and earn from buyers worldwide. RevenueCat found AI apps convert from trial to paid 52% better at the median. Apple’s own commissioned study, reported by Cult of Mac, found more than 40 of the App Store’s top 100 apps now include consumer AI features, and that those apps grew billings four times faster than the rest of the top 100.
Cheap building does let people test ideas that would have been too costly five years ago. It does not hand them a customer.
Playground is US-only and limited to adults for now. Google has said it plans to reach more countries but has given no date. Whenever it does arrive in India, the gallery’s ranking system, not the game’s quality alone, will be what decides who plays it.
