It can still be true though, because entry is nothing without sales and a continued search for product market fit. I don’t know about 1% but if you say ‘for every 100 apps launched in 2015-2020 only 1 turned into a sustainable business’ I’d say that’s in the ballpark.

If code becomes cheaper that may change the business fundamentals but it also means capturing customers becomes way harder.

In a former life I was a freelancer who built first version mobile apps for seed and pre-seed startups. I’m a decent dev, so what I built was always good enough. Virtually none of these startups survived, and there were dozens of them.

Even a decade ago marketing/growth was the massive lion's share. IMO just building something has been near meaningless since at least post-Ruby on Rails. The app stores have been inundated since the late 2010s.