Mike Harrington and Darrin Massena think that making an app with AI is still too hard.
While you can ask Claude or ChatGPT to build something for you, that demands at least some awareness of programming frameworks and hosting options. AI app builders like Replit and Cursor also aim to be professional-grade development tools for businesses, not something you’d use to quickly scratch a personal itch.
Harrington’s and Messena’s startup, Playful , wants to bring vibe coding to a much broader audience. With a handful of simple prompts, Playful will build web-based apps and games that you can push to your phone and share with friends. Users can create up to two apps for free and use them for up to 30 days, at which point the service requires a $10 per month subscription.
[Photo: Playful]
“It’s for an audience that is less technical, for an audience that until recently didn’t even understand that they could make apps,” Harrington says.
Playful isn’t the first company to try bringing AI app creation to mainstream audiences. The highest-profile example is Wabi , which raised $20 million last year to be the “ YouTube of apps ,” though it has since pivoted to be more of an app-powered personal AI agent (while raising another $55 million ). The App Store is also awash in apps like Vibecode , Vibecoder , and VibeStudio , which look to varying degrees like they were made with AI themselves.
Harrington and Massena, who worked together on Microsoft Bob and later sold their photo editor startup Picnik to Google , are betting that a combination of social sharing features and their own expertise in software development will help Playful break through. Harrington also cofounded Valve Software, where he worked on the hit PC game Half-Life . The duo launched their startup in 2023 under the name Hatch , intending to offer a no-code platform for web apps, and pivoted to artificial intelligence after realizing how it would make app creation much more accessible.
“We’ve always gone after things that are consumer-oriented, and fun, and to a certain kind of audience,” Harrington says. “Picnik . . . grew from just a little photo editor to where we had 60 million monthly uniques, and about 85% of them were women. It’s just a market that people didn’t go after, and I think there’s a similar thing in apps.”
[Image: Playful]
How Playful works
Creating an app in Playful starts with a simple question: “What kind of app do you want to make, and who’s it for?”
What happens next is where Playful distinguishes itself from a typical chatbot. Based on your original prompt, it will ask follow-up questions on things like the features you most care about and how you’ll use the app.
For instance, I asked Playful to build an audio transcription app that cleans up the text, identifies speakers, creates topic shortcuts to skip to, and lets you tap on the text to hear the corresponding audio. Playful in turn asked about recording scenarios—interviews, lectures, or personal voice notes—and whether I’d want to do things like access old interviews or export full transcripts.
“It helps you with the process because it understands a lot of things about apps, making apps, what might make sense, what’s popular in apps,” Massena says.
After a few minutes, Playful presents a smartphone-sized app that you can run through Playful’s own app or turn into a standalone icon on your home screen. The apps are web-based, so they work on any device, without distribution through any app store.
Behind the scenes, Harrington and Massena say that Playful uses a variety of large language models to fulfill users’ requests. Compared with using a more general-purpose AI tool, Harrington says Playful has more specific training on the process of creating apps and how to distill users’ requests. It also has built-in tools for things like data storage, and it can offer AI capabilities like summarization within the apps themselves. The ability to connect external data sources such as email and calendars is on the way.
“No one has to worry about ‘Where’s my stuff stored, what kind of database is needed for this?’” Massena says. “If you look at a lot of the other products out there . . . there’s still a lot of technical problems that you have to get comfortable with.”
That’s not to say a single prompt is always enough. With my attempt at a transcription tool, for instance, Playful’s app initially crashed out to a blank screen, and then tried to impose a 20-minute recording limit. After some working with Playful’s chatbot to solve those problems, it took some extra back-and-forth to get proper transcript formatting, and I gave up on trying to label speakers as it just never worked well.
Even so, the resulting app was helpful in reviewing my recorded interview for this story, and Harrington and Massena say they’ve been impressed with what early testers have come up with. One user, for instance, built an entire Excel-style spreadsheet editor for personal finance, while another built their own take on Capcut for AI video editing and captioning.
“It’s amazing what people have built out,” Massena says.
[Image: Playful]
A new kind of app store
Playful’s apps aren’t just for individual use. Users can share their apps with others via a link or email invite, and they’ll automatically get updates when the creator pushes out new versions. Playful also supports sharing a “Copy” of the app—with separate data for each user—and “Remixing” so that others can modify the app as they wish.
Massena says the long-term vision is for those shared, editable apps to be the “new normal” for app distribution, versus the “take it or leave it” approach of conventional app stores.
“Why wouldn’t you go to a place where you could pull an app off the shelf, it was incredibly high-quality, full-featured, but that you could change any way you want to meet your needs?” he says. “That’s going to become the new normal for apps.”
The only point of friction in this argument is Playful’s business model, which strictly limits what users can do without a $10 per month subscription. After 30 days, Playful puts free users’ apps to sleep, and it bars them from creating more than two apps total.
Massena says Playful initially experimented with a different approach, in which users received a certain number of “credits” to use as they wished. But that just led to anxiety from testers around how many credits they were using. Even without a subscription, Playful does want to allow users to try other users’ apps, at least to some extent.
“Maybe you have a new inspiration, something there you want to try out, we’ll make sure that that’s always possible for people,” Massena says.
Whether or not Playful succeeds, it illustrates the uncharted territory where we’re heading with software. The iOS App Store is already seeing a boom in submissions , and Microsoft’s GitHub has been drastically increasing capacity due to a sixfold increase in code commits. Last month, the developer Brandon Thomas declared that “ software is over ” after using AI to spit out a series of lookalikes for popular apps like Adobe Photoshop and Microsoft Word.
What does the future of software look like when anyone can build a free version of an app they like that also better suits their needs? It’s unclear, but Massena and Harrington hope to be at the forefront of the answer.
“Software companies are going to have to be more responsive to people, or it’ll be much easier to find alternatives,” Massena says. “We’re building a platform for that new future.”
