Sometimes “better” means “customized for my specific use case.” I expect that there will be a lot of custom software that never appears in any app store.

The amount of single purpose scripts in my ~/playground/ folder has increased dramatically over the past year. Super useful, wouldn’t have had the time for it otherwise, but not in any way shareable. Eg “parse this excel sheet I got from my obscure bank and upload it to my budgeting app’s REST API”. Wouldn’t have had the time or energy to do this before, now I have it and it scratches an itch.

Customization often turns out to be a long term liability. Funnily enough, my employer learned this 20 years ago with our ERP and we are still paying the price.

This. Just today I added a full on shopping list system to our internal dashboard at work (small business) simply because it was slightly annoying and could be solved in 3 prompts and 15 minutes.

If we take it a step further, in a few years, why would anyone purchase generic software anymore? If we can perfectly customise software for our needs and preferences for almost free, why would anyone purchase generic software from an App Store? I genuinely think Apple's business model is in jeopardy.