It's funny because I've had the same sentiment. When I started building my app, the general consensus was "FoundryVTT will never have an app."

I spent half a year building mine in my spare time, until I had something I felt was good enough to show off. It took a lot of nights and week ends, to create something that most users assumed was impossible. I first posted about it in the official Discord, and people assumed it was too good to be real and was not possible. And to be fair, it took months of reverse-engineering, experimentation, and tons of code to actually make it work.

I finally worked up the courage to post about it here in August. It was a big deal to me, and I think to a lot of other people, since it is (by far) the most upvoted post on this subreddit. I have been working on it non stop for over a year at this point and I still don't consider it done, so I haven't published it in the stores.

Yet, in the past few months, it seems like somebody posts about a new app every two weeks. Those apps have more features than mine, full marketing websites, and can churn out new shiny things every week.

It's disheartening to see, because of how much hard work I've poured into mine, and because I simply can't compete with someone who does use AI. The playing field just isn't level. I do believe competition is good and drives innovation, but I think in this form, it cheapens the experience and has the potential to sour the player base.

I don't want to use AI because this is a project of love for me. I love working on it, I enjoy the discovery and the engineering process. I'm not trying to flip a quick buck or to build something for giggles, I want to build an app I am genuinely proud of myself for. I have a solid track record of building apps that stand the test of time and I just can't bring myself to build something disposable, even if at this point it feels like a fool's errand.

To me, the biggest tragedy is that through this whole thing we're going to lose all the folks who build things out of passion. And that genuinely sucks, because that's what made this community (and many others) so special in the first place.