Why your favorite creator is building an app

Hello, and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of making apps for your phone on your phone. I'm your friend David Pierce. And today on the show, what it's like to be a vibe coding app developer and also a content creator. But first, here's everything else happening on The Verge today. I'm Josh Cajas, and this is ninety seconds on The Verge from Monday, 10/19/2026. Apple has sent invites to a second product launch this month. According to Bloomberg, the big announcement is expected to be a new, lighter MacBook Pro with an OLED touchscreen and an iPhone like Dynamic Island. The event is next week, October 28 at 1PM Eastern, and as always, we'll be covering it here live at The Verge. Meanwhile, you can see everything had the biggest opening weekend for a documentary in twenty years. Nathan Fielder's three hour doc about Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes raked in $15,000,000 in its opening weekend, landing in second place at the box office behind Street Fighter. But that's not the only doc making headlines right now. Just ahead of the wide release of the new Elon Musk documentary this past weekend, TikTok banned the film's social media account from its platform. While TikTok has no affiliation with Elon, part owner Larry Ellison appears in the film via text message offering to help Musk fund his Twitter purchase. A TikTok spokesperson confirmed to The Verge that the ad account for the Musk doc has quote been restored after an error unquote. Our TikTok feeds may be blessed by Elon Musk once again. And finally, in a world full of digital licenses and no guarantee ownership, there is some hope. New York congressman Richie Torres introduced the Power to the Players Act last week. If passed, this bill would direct the FTC to establish regulations that guarantee consumers ownership of a game when they pay for it rather than a licensing agreement. Hopefully, this bill has better luck than that store once PlayStation phases out physical games in 2028. You can read more at theverge.com. That's ninety seconds on the verge from Monday, 10/19/2026. Support for the show comes from AWS AI. AWS AI is helping the world's leading organizations transform their industries in production at scale right now. From bringing fans inside every swing at the PGA Tour to helping small businesses grow online with GoDaddy to taking vehicles from concept to customer with Audi, AWS AI is how businesses innovate, lead, and revolutionize. AWS AI is how. Over the last several months, there's been this really interesting trend, at least in a particular corner of the technology world, which is that a bunch of people on YouTube and elsewhere who have spent a long time reviewing apps, recommending apps, talking about apps, have started making apps. People who, especially in the productivity space, have, like, spent years being mad that no to do list app did exactly what they wanted, have turned to things like Codex and …