This is such a romantic idea, but unfortunately Apple and Google are hostile to this model.
Of the two, iOS is /worst/ for running vibe coded apps.
You need to pay $99 a year to be an Apple developer if you want your app to live on your phone for more than a a week.
Distribution is a also pain in the ass even for personal use alone (you can't just toss around an IPA).
Finally, so many useful APIs are totally locked up. The fact that I cannot in 2026 extend Siri, for example, us infuriating.
Android is far more promising but Google recently shot themselves in the foot with their verified APK nonsense. Google's privacy posture is infamously nonexistent as well, and I have little interest in rooting a Pixel at my age.
Hopefully now that enough people can vibe code, these walls will crumble a bit.
It still holds for the desktop, though. LLMs have helped me quickly code new software for lab equipment (total users ~6), a research tool for my partner, and for several desktop apps I just use for me.
Two apps fill niches that I've wanted to code myself (one, I've wanted to code for the last twenty years on and off), but have never had the time to do so. Now, the speed from thought to working prototype is insane (less than an hour); it then takes a few days of occasional work to turn that prototype into something architecturally sound and half-decent.
And after that... well, I just keep improving, refactoring, refining, because it's so much fun.
Which is why computer freedom is so important it needs to be enshrined into law. Stuff like remote attestation, locked down boot loaders and "app stores" need to be made literally illegal. Ownership of the computer should be a constitutional right.
Oh no! $99! If you're rich enough to have bought into the Apple walled garden, $99 is nothing. Can't go out for a nice dinner with the family for less than that these days. Yeah it would be great if Apple gave it away for free, but it's their walled garden that we've locked ourselves into. My bigger complaint about Apple is how overboard they've gone with the security stuff, making it it that much harder to develop software for their systems, on top of costing more. But, gotta go to where the users are.
I ran across WebXDC this past weekend, and I'm intrigued. I've built a few apps on it already, and I'm very pleasantly surprised by how cleverly inverted the whole model is (in combination with ChatMail). Delta Chat is available on iOS, I believe. I use Arcanechat on Android.
The beauty of the ecosystem is that apps are just zips of a webapp that is self-contained, and uses the webxdc api to message other copies of itself running on other folks' phones that are part of that chat group. Basically, the app communicates (and is distributed over!) the group chat (it's otherwise insulated from the internet). And because apps are just zipped webapps, they can be pulled apart, hacked on, and reassembled as needed for your group.
ChatMail relays tend not to retain info - they aren't hosts, they just relay encrypted messages (the platform mandates encryption). This sidesteps all the approval/review processes, and there is no app store or developer fee or even SDK. It's just folks trading apps and running them together.
It can't solve a lot of cases, but it solves some use cases (like a shared grocery list, or real-time card games, or games with leaderboards) really well.
You can make perfectly good apps that run great with a free account. They expire in a week instead of 3 months (for TestFlight builds). That's it. You can redeploy with minimal effort. You have to reauth with Apple every ~30 days. The reauth is the only part of that you can't have a cron job run (you need to authenticate the keychain).
For normie folks, the hoops here are mildly annoying. But if you're someone making vibe-coded apps, we're talking about two scripts and a cron job, here. Or just run Sideloadly, which I hear works pretty well.
There exist reasons to be annoyed by Apple's iOS security posture, but "I can't run my vibecoded apps" isn't an especially good one.
For most people I believe it's a good exchange for the value of a more secure device.
But yes, I don't really want to pay Apple $100 a year just to run my apps. So I just have them as PWAs. Wouldn't work for many use cases, like when you need Apple Fitness data, but works for me and it looks fine.
I'm building a podcast app just for me, because the podcast app I typically use (PocketCasts) is really good but there's just a couple of features I'd like and they don't bring out a lot of new features since it's not a monthly SaaS.
LLMs are a good help here because side projects typically slow down for me when I run into bugs / troubleshooting. So while I genuinely believe struggle is necessary for learning, being able to get over that hump to build something I need makes a big difference.
I'm not vibe coding the app though, since I actually want to know what it does. But I can see it being helpful for people who just need something and don't care about how it works.
> ...they don't bring out a lot of new features since it's not a monthly SaaS.
But it is! The Patron level of Pocket Casts is $15.99 / month!
I used to love Pocket Casts, but it didn't have the ability to easily add an RSS feed URL locally without submitting it to their index - which I don't want to do with my AI's personalised morning podcast (and that's another category, Podcast For One). I've had to use AntennaPod for that, but it's missing all the silence clipping and audio normalising features that Pocket Casts has. I'd love to see someone improve on it, and I've been tempted to do it myself too. Good luck!
Can confirm. I spent maybe 5-6 hours rebuilding an app I did in WinForms (originally Java… I forget the framework, Swing or something?) as a web app for a small business. Nothing fancy, basic CRM with existing database ported to SQLite and hosted on a cheapo VPS. Pure Codex CLI play none of that Cursor Orca rubbish. They’re very happy with it. Responsive, dark mode, works even without JavaScript. Nice unit test suite, simple server-side rendered. The traditional way. It’s the cats ass. Additional 2 hours for a couple of new requested features. Whatever! Easy peasy.
At work the team is leaning be heavily into internal tooling. Doesn’t need heavy support. Doesn’t need a fancy designer. Duct tape glue and liquid wrench are more than enough. It’s quick enough that it’s throw away and so if need be we can always write a v2 without losing months or years of work. Just enough to be useful, and then back to actual work.
This mitigates problems with LLMs' low quality code. For a single user, the bar is much lower. The app doesn't have to have all the features that work for everyone's edge cases, implemented in a way that other devs can maintain. It only needs to be good enough for one user, and can be discarded and recreated when it gets too messy.
* A personal music player for Apple Music with an embedded agent loop, so I can say things like "I'm going to work in the wood shop, play woodworking-appropriate music and keep the playlist full and non-repeating indefinitely".
* A calorie/protein tracker that takes 1-liner summaries of meals, resolves them to macros with GPT5 calls, and tracks them in SQLite.
* A macOS menubar combined Apple TV and Roku TV remote control.
* A calculator front-end to SageMath that renders Latex math notation and has point/click shortcut affordances for linear algebra and MVC.
* A "self driving wiki" macOS desktop llmwiki that imports and digests PDFs.
* A menubar tracker for the little temperature sensors I have scattered all throughout the house so I can click my menubar and instantly see the temps in the different rooms of the house.
* A layout tool for designing picture frames to get cut lists and rabbet depths and stuff.
That's just the desktop stuff. These applications are generally better than what I'd get from the App Store. The calorie tracker is one of the better-designed apps on my dock.
I feel like I'm not doing this enough yet, it hasn't fully sunk in, and I'm going to be building a lot more stuff when it does sink in. I haven't yet gotten to the point of writing my own note-taking application (still Bear.app for that), but how long can that last?
the post on BoopSnoop was very impactful for me too! As a software engineer, it's drilled into your brain that you have to think about high scalability and user facing products. I used to have a lot of ideas, but the first instinct was always to build a paid user facing product. None ever got built. But after reading that post a few years ago, my mindset was completely flipped. Since then I've built umpteen tools, services, macOS menubar apps, tail scale services .. just for myself. And I love it!
Yup! Can confirm, I wanted to blog, but I wanted it to work in a certain way to let me focusing on writing that no single system had, or cost too much.
Now I'm actually doing it.
I've had an idea for how I want to be social with friends and family (a website, but setup within my vision). Now it's done
Could I have done all of these things on my own or just paid for existing services? Yes
But now AI can do it for me while I watch TV. I just show up to test.
Side note, why not just deploy onto a VPS and save the money from using hosted services, as well as protecting yourself from when they inevitably go down? The CBA clearly shows that while active development is going on its trivial to have hosted service subscriptions because the AI sub is way more, but what if that sub disappears? You're left paying (relatively) exorbitant amounts compared to $1-10 per month per VPS for life, or less if you have the privilege and wherewithal to self host. It's also dead easy with AI. Maybe this just reinforces how much a personal runtime solution is needed, as stated in YC's recent RFS.
Many people build calorie / macro tracker like OP but they don't build maintenance calorie tracker.
Your app tracks calorie intake, doesn't keep track of total calorie burn of the day (maintenance calorie tracking)
And no, calorie burn from watch is not good enough!
>A 2020 systematic review by Fuller et al. found that consumer wearables often perform poorly at estimating energy expenditure, even when they measure steps and heart rate reasonably well. Across brands like Apple, Garmin, Polar, and Withings, calorie burn estimates frequently showed substantial error, often in the 15–40% range and sometimes exceeding 50%. Wearables can still be useful for tracking trends, but not for precise calorie calculations.
Agree with the general spirit of the piece, but the examples that he gave create more problem than solving problems.
> A fitness app that sizes my smoothie to that morning's run
I don't feel I need more than the phone's calculator app for this particular problem.
Other examples could be solved by the Notes app, I feel.
I deliberately avoid creating new "apps", and make do with existing apps and solutions and create workflows rather than apps.
I write scripts, add features to scripts and understand all lines of them.
There are very few exceptions to this, like, I vibe coded a visual PDF cropper app that also handles scaling, merging in a GUI built with PyQt and GTK.
Having entire apps create maintenance burden and headaches.
Funny he said "Good APIs matter more than ever". My software for one these past few weeks has been my mega archive project, making an APIs & UIs out of 50+ providers whether they like it or not. I'm calling it clump chart. I even got into my turbotax TaxML files.
Genuine question: how will this "software for one" outlive its creator? I realize that if it were truly intended for just one user, it wouldn't matter, but in this specific case, the software is used by family members, so...
About four years ago I started building an RSS reader that was supposed to use an algorithm. The problem is, I didn't code in years and wasn't familiar with the modern web stack. I had to drop it, although was still able to sell the domain I got for $500 (nice).
And then, with Codex and Claude, I finally built it this year and enjoy it every day, along with 30 other strangers, since I made it public. It's a great feeling.
I now finally have an app that I use to save both links and articles to read, sort of in-between of Readwise Reader and Raindrop (and it does sync with Readwise).
I write my blog posts in a little browser-based note-taking app with sharing. It's minimal and looks great but has all I need.
I built a few Chrome extensions that I really wanted but couldn't find (well, couldn't find beautiful options).
I don't think everyone will do this. And getting the audience is a major pain, always has been, but now most of your early adopters just go and build their own things just like you. I'll still take it.
83 comments
[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 16.4 ms ] threadOf the two, iOS is /worst/ for running vibe coded apps.
You need to pay $99 a year to be an Apple developer if you want your app to live on your phone for more than a a week.
Distribution is a also pain in the ass even for personal use alone (you can't just toss around an IPA).
Finally, so many useful APIs are totally locked up. The fact that I cannot in 2026 extend Siri, for example, us infuriating.
Android is far more promising but Google recently shot themselves in the foot with their verified APK nonsense. Google's privacy posture is infamously nonexistent as well, and I have little interest in rooting a Pixel at my age.
Hopefully now that enough people can vibe code, these walls will crumble a bit.
Don't do that, that's a PITA. Put GrapheneOS on it instead—simple, no hassle, works great
Two apps fill niches that I've wanted to code myself (one, I've wanted to code for the last twenty years on and off), but have never had the time to do so. Now, the speed from thought to working prototype is insane (less than an hour); it then takes a few days of occasional work to turn that prototype into something architecturally sound and half-decent.
And after that... well, I just keep improving, refactoring, refining, because it's so much fun.
https://webxdc.org/
https://chatmail.at/
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/delta-chat/id1459523234
https://arcanechat.me/
The beauty of the ecosystem is that apps are just zips of a webapp that is self-contained, and uses the webxdc api to message other copies of itself running on other folks' phones that are part of that chat group. Basically, the app communicates (and is distributed over!) the group chat (it's otherwise insulated from the internet). And because apps are just zipped webapps, they can be pulled apart, hacked on, and reassembled as needed for your group.
ChatMail relays tend not to retain info - they aren't hosts, they just relay encrypted messages (the platform mandates encryption). This sidesteps all the approval/review processes, and there is no app store or developer fee or even SDK. It's just folks trading apps and running them together.
It can't solve a lot of cases, but it solves some use cases (like a shared grocery list, or real-time card games, or games with leaderboards) really well.
You can make perfectly good apps that run great with a free account. They expire in a week instead of 3 months (for TestFlight builds). That's it. You can redeploy with minimal effort. You have to reauth with Apple every ~30 days. The reauth is the only part of that you can't have a cron job run (you need to authenticate the keychain).
For normie folks, the hoops here are mildly annoying. But if you're someone making vibe-coded apps, we're talking about two scripts and a cron job, here. Or just run Sideloadly, which I hear works pretty well.
There exist reasons to be annoyed by Apple's iOS security posture, but "I can't run my vibecoded apps" isn't an especially good one.
But yes, I don't really want to pay Apple $100 a year just to run my apps. So I just have them as PWAs. Wouldn't work for many use cases, like when you need Apple Fitness data, but works for me and it looks fine.
LLMs are a good help here because side projects typically slow down for me when I run into bugs / troubleshooting. So while I genuinely believe struggle is necessary for learning, being able to get over that hump to build something I need makes a big difference.
I'm not vibe coding the app though, since I actually want to know what it does. But I can see it being helpful for people who just need something and don't care about how it works.
But it is! The Patron level of Pocket Casts is $15.99 / month!
I used to love Pocket Casts, but it didn't have the ability to easily add an RSS feed URL locally without submitting it to their index - which I don't want to do with my AI's personalised morning podcast (and that's another category, Podcast For One). I've had to use AntennaPod for that, but it's missing all the silence clipping and audio normalising features that Pocket Casts has. I'd love to see someone improve on it, and I've been tempted to do it myself too. Good luck!
At work the team is leaning be heavily into internal tooling. Doesn’t need heavy support. Doesn’t need a fancy designer. Duct tape glue and liquid wrench are more than enough. It’s quick enough that it’s throw away and so if need be we can always write a v2 without losing months or years of work. Just enough to be useful, and then back to actual work.
* A personal music player for Apple Music with an embedded agent loop, so I can say things like "I'm going to work in the wood shop, play woodworking-appropriate music and keep the playlist full and non-repeating indefinitely".
* A calorie/protein tracker that takes 1-liner summaries of meals, resolves them to macros with GPT5 calls, and tracks them in SQLite.
* A macOS menubar combined Apple TV and Roku TV remote control.
* A calculator front-end to SageMath that renders Latex math notation and has point/click shortcut affordances for linear algebra and MVC.
* A "self driving wiki" macOS desktop llmwiki that imports and digests PDFs.
* A menubar tracker for the little temperature sensors I have scattered all throughout the house so I can click my menubar and instantly see the temps in the different rooms of the house.
* A layout tool for designing picture frames to get cut lists and rabbet depths and stuff.
That's just the desktop stuff. These applications are generally better than what I'd get from the App Store. The calorie tracker is one of the better-designed apps on my dock.
I feel like I'm not doing this enough yet, it hasn't fully sunk in, and I'm going to be building a lot more stuff when it does sink in. I haven't yet gotten to the point of writing my own note-taking application (still Bear.app for that), but how long can that last?
Now I'm actually doing it.
I've had an idea for how I want to be social with friends and family (a website, but setup within my vision). Now it's done
Could I have done all of these things on my own or just paid for existing services? Yes
But now AI can do it for me while I watch TV. I just show up to test.
I will if you are building anything good. What even is this statement?
> Our sleep consultant's plan arrived as a PDF full of conditional logic: wake windows, nap caps, what to do when a nap fails
Every so often, you get a glimpse into a whole world you never knew existed.
Your app tracks calorie intake, doesn't keep track of total calorie burn of the day (maintenance calorie tracking)
And no, calorie burn from watch is not good enough!
>A 2020 systematic review by Fuller et al. found that consumer wearables often perform poorly at estimating energy expenditure, even when they measure steps and heart rate reasonably well. Across brands like Apple, Garmin, Polar, and Withings, calorie burn estimates frequently showed substantial error, often in the 15–40% range and sometimes exceeding 50%. Wearables can still be useful for tracking trends, but not for precise calorie calculations.
Here's completely free one i built, https://macrocodex.app/ 16,000+ users already.
Maybe Google is eliminating sideloading to force people to not make their own apk’s now that it’s easy to do so.
> A fitness app that sizes my smoothie to that morning's run
I don't feel I need more than the phone's calculator app for this particular problem.
Other examples could be solved by the Notes app, I feel.
I deliberately avoid creating new "apps", and make do with existing apps and solutions and create workflows rather than apps.
I write scripts, add features to scripts and understand all lines of them.
There are very few exceptions to this, like, I vibe coded a visual PDF cropper app that also handles scaling, merging in a GUI built with PyQt and GTK.
Having entire apps create maintenance burden and headaches.
https://devonzuegel.com/situated-software
About four years ago I started building an RSS reader that was supposed to use an algorithm. The problem is, I didn't code in years and wasn't familiar with the modern web stack. I had to drop it, although was still able to sell the domain I got for $500 (nice).
And then, with Codex and Claude, I finally built it this year and enjoy it every day, along with 30 other strangers, since I made it public. It's a great feeling.
I now finally have an app that I use to save both links and articles to read, sort of in-between of Readwise Reader and Raindrop (and it does sync with Readwise).
I write my blog posts in a little browser-based note-taking app with sharing. It's minimal and looks great but has all I need.
I built a few Chrome extensions that I really wanted but couldn't find (well, couldn't find beautiful options).
I don't think everyone will do this. And getting the audience is a major pain, always has been, but now most of your early adopters just go and build their own things just like you. I'll still take it.
I'm not sure I believe this is a real job. Do we really need to pay consultants to tell us that babies need naps?