This app is really quite fascinating as well as amazing. I have been using it for a week now. I do like how it is so good with Swift and iOS; you have done a great job of removing so much of the confusion that LLMs must face when trying to develop for a demanding platform. The API insight the app has is a testament to your deep background and foresight into iOS development. I really love this.

Also, I have been taking the code and advice from Bitrig into Cursor, because it solves problems Cursor struggles with no matter what model it calls.

Your work is empowering, but more than that, it is inspiring, because I can now start to envisage what computer human interaction will look like in the near future.

You have taken away a layer of complexity to creation and that is to be applauded. I think your work is a landmark. I think Bitrig will unleash a new era of creative expression. I wish that I was part of your team.

This is crazy, you guys basically rebuilt Swift (interpreter instead of compiler) and also the frameworks. This is the level of engineering that does the magic of "it just works". I, personally, am very interested in swift, and would love to work for free for you guys.

Super impressive app and experience, it is incredible that you can get Swift to do this with such interactivity! Rebuilding Swift to be interpreted is a bold move,

-Chris

When I was in middle school I remember a friend lieing that there is “a mobile app to create mobile apps”. I thought it’s an amazing idea, but it was way too early. I love how this hallucination became a reality. Good luck!

Would you consider having a way to export work done in this app to be included as part of regular Xcode projects?

I've been working on a project and sometimes when I'm away from my laptop I have ideas I want to try in SwiftUI but only have my phone on me. What I end up doing is just writing my idea in text and then waiting till I'm back at my desk to give it a shot. Being able to spin up a quick prototype and preview it on the go could be cool.

I don't think my dog would enjoy me lugging my laptop on our walks but my phone is no big deal ;).

Neat. I just tried it out and one thing I was pleasantly surprised about was the styling it came up with. It was sleek, and it did not have the purply gradienty tailwindy styling that I always get from Claude. Did you do much to adjust the prompt for custom styles?

On a personal note, I wanted to thank the HN community. I’ve been reading HN since college (for over 15 years now!) and it’s been formative in my development as a software engineer and leader.

I don’t pipe up very often, but I visit HN almost every day. Many of the books I read, blogs I frequent, and podcasts I listen to, I found via HN. I think it’s fair to say, if it weren’t for HN, that Bitrig wouldn’t be Bitrig and SwiftUI wouldn’t be SwiftUI.

It doesn't seem like this is the direction you are going, but this feels like what Siri could become (though I have little faith given the history).

With your sunscreen example, I should be able to just ask Siri to do exactly this, and it could tap me in my pocket, show me a custom UI to log periodically and then disappear.

Not sure on limitations of APIs on iOS but definitely feels like there is space for a better voice assistant, just like how Raycast have created a better Spotlight on Mac.

Looks very cool so far!

Doesn’t work at all for me.

Entered my my prompt… It did a bunch of stuff - apparently initially focused on making me an app icon which I don’t really care about.

I moved away from the app, went back and everything had gone and my prompt was just sitting there by itself.

I said “please proceed” and it opened a new chat, did the same thing. It was doing stuff, I moved to something else, went back, everything vanished.

So that’s two of my five free messages zapped. And all of my patience.

I've been using the app a bit and I like the idea but one of the major things keeping me from using it is that the model is just fundamentally lazy and without having an easy way to review the code on my phone it's not easy to check its work. If it needs to do something which requires talking to a web API it will often just populate the app with fake data silently. Apps for phones are very dependent on web APIs and with people heavily locking this down these days (when's the last time you've used an API that doesn't ask you for an API token?) I feel like most of the apps are limited to being local-only. There are plenty of nice local-only apps on iPhone, don't get me wrong. I'm sure there is a timer app that is just right for everyone. But most of my tasks require more context about my life, or the outside world. Bitrig isn't able to oneshot this yet–but it definitely does make pretty UIs.

First, as a non-developer geek -- super fun.

What happens if you go over 100 messages/month?

I just burned my 5 free messages to get a simple toggle button working that just says "win" (with animated fireworks!) and "lose". I'm sure I'm not an efficient prompter, but it seems I'd knock out 100 messages easily in an afternoon, which looks to be the monthly limit at $20/mo.

(This is coming from someone who has no idea how expensive it would be to 'vibe code' using something like Claude ... so it may be an entirely unfair assumption that you could chat with this 'unlimited' for $20/mo ... that's what I have in my head as 'reasonable' only because that's what I pay for Gemini or ChatGPT and, for all intents and purposes, it feels 'unlimited'.)

Very cool! Was it difficult to get Bitrig approved on the App Store? If I had to guess just based on the idea, it seems like the sort of thing Apple would take issue with.

This is what Apple Intelligence should’ve been.

Hey,

I do not own an iPhone and I do not use swift. I just want to say congrats on the launch, this looks and sounds really cool. And watching your interactions in this thread, you look like you'll do really well!

> We’re ingesting Apple’s SDK frameworks into Bitrig piece by piece. If you try to build something and hit a missing framework, let us know and we’ll prioritize adding it.

Submitted request for WebKit to be added.

In the app I asked it to make, I requested that it use a web view to log into YouTube. The generated app opens a mostly blank screen with no web view, and from what your app told me I think it’s because it’s missing WebKit.

WebKit as a whole might be big, but maybe some subset of it to support web views and get cookies from the web view could be supported?

Seems like a cool concept! I downloaded and entered an email address but haven't received a verification code yet after 10 minutes. It's an Apple Private Relay email if that matters.

Also, side note: magic link or email-based OTP login is by far my least favorite method of login, especially for a phone app. It's cumbersome, annoying, and completely unnecessary now that passkeys exist. Barring that I'd still rather use email/pw login any day of the week.

Hey Kyle, looks very cool!

- If Bitrig can do things like let your app have editable data, or make rest api calls, etc. it would be nice to see a little more in the demo video.

- Sounds like you don’t have an expensive mic/studio for recording, but luckily this is free and can work wonders for your audio: https://podcast.adobe.com/en/enhance

Best of luck with the launch.

Would it be possible to embed Bitrig in an existing app? Similar to how you might embed React Native into a portion of your app to accelerate development in a specific area, it’d be awesome to preserve the mature areas of our apps and use Bitrig to quickly iterate on new features.

With vibe coding, I generally find that it will get me 80-90% of the way to where I want to be, but I generally end up having to do some work too. How does that work here? Is there any way to later edit the app on my mac if I need to? Similarly, once my app is "done" for some definition of done, can I compile it into a native app rather than an interpreted one?

I’ve just tested it out, and purchased a subscription within 5 minutes, for an app we were seriously discussing with a friend over the last days.

Keep crushing!

I’ve been playing with the TestFlight build and it’s really solid. Can you share any under the hood details of how the system is able to accurately map the loose prompt to fully native SwiftUI components. Mostly curious because I’d love to also build internal data dense apps typically better suited for desktop.

Great work and I hope to become a paying customer soon!

This crashed for me after my third question. Subsequent attempts to load the project immediately crash. I don’t think AI models are good enough for this level of hands off coding, unfortunatey

I'm using Firefox for Android, and I'm unable to scroll on the homepage at all.

Fun to see the app prompted was essentially the same as an app my friend Dave and I built back in 2010: Sun Safe. Ours had nicer UI tho https://web.archive.org/web/20120628042327/http://www.sunsaf...

This is great work. I've already got my proof of concept 75% of the way in hours. But I think I've hit a rate limit. Do you plan on showing something in-app that indicates how many requests you have left?

I'm not really sure if I've hit a limit or if something else is going on.

I wish Apple would let us build and install these apps locally without fuss.

Consider adding BYOK/Bring your own API for LLM calls if possible, some of us like to keep our data with ourselves, no matter what that data is.

Very cool. I would probably build this using SDUI server driven abstractions. Curious if you considered that approach to build bitrig or parts of it.

Apart from this great app, what is the current state of the art in vibe coding iOS apps? Just using Cursor with an open iOS simulator?

I'm on an iPhone SE, and the UI doesn't quite fit. The response text isn't easily scrollable, so I have to drag the text up, instead of just scrolling.

I stopped using Apple products but need to create a couple of iOS apps. I was debating buying a Mac Mini or using "Macincloud" but this seems like an excellent option. Being able to edit the Swift code means fixing nuances.

I'll likely subscribe to your service.

For distribution strategy you could experiment with letting people create simple apps for free and put a perpetual ad for your service ad the bottom of the app.

Did you just casually built a workout posture tracking and rep counting app? :-)

Anyway, congrats on the launch!!

This is a really good idea, but I’ve noticed that, even with developer experience and using Claude code, building a complex app is extremely difficult and takes dozens of prompts to get things actually working. This is probably a great prototyping tool, but I’m curious to know how far this can go to build production level apps.

So I have an existing typescript project, can I still use your software to build the app part of it in a monorepo?

What big assumptions are you testing with it?

I pasted your URL into my app and it came up with:

- Non-developers want to create mobile apps without coding. - Users are willing to pay for an AI-powered mobile app builder. - AI can generate functional apps using only a conversational interface.

The data collection is very concerning and is preventing me from using the app though I want to

Huh I was just thinking vibe coding on my phone while having a beer would be fun. I’ll check it out. Is there a good way to give feedback? I didn’t see any obvious community/contact/discord/discourse on the website.

Are there iOS apps that let me create native Swift apps for my phone (including execution on my device, not in the cloud), on my phone, but _without_ chatting to AI? Just by writing code, the "old" way?

For some reason I dislike Log-In by Mail. Since this is purely based on iOS devices, log-in with Apple seems to be an obvious and frictionless solution.

Tried to create a canvas like app view, your app froze after some prompts (guess the swift interpreter?) reopening the app and selecting the project again does not help

I think it’s a question of time until the mobile OS do this natively as a part of responding to user request. Like those Siri app snippets (scores, maps, stocks …), but with whatever adhoc UI that’s needed to best present the result (or allow the user to further interact).

“What to do in Zagreb with a family?” will build a personalized map & content app tailored to everything the AI knows about your preferences.

AI services will want to own this, but the current OS makers have all the incentives to not let them, so I expected OpenAI hardware to be this - a smartphone with launcher basically replaced by a prompt.

Until then, you might sell Bitrig to them as a way to wrestle this approach onto competing platforms, wrapped inside their app?

As an indie app maker (Weathergraph - a beautiful hourly forecast visualization), I should probably include the Ralph “I’m in danger” gif :)

Just bought my iphone16 yesterday

Going to try this now

Wow, this is great. Would you mind if I reached out over email?

this is super super cool - awesome to see something technically hard and novel. congrats on the launch!

I love what you guys are doing but highlights how absurdly hard iOS development is compared to web

I downloaded the app but it keeps crashing on open

PRO payment is per month or per year?

Not to be confused with Bitwig music production studio/software.

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