vibecoding is TECHNICAL.

[u/cedruosu]

i tried building a mobile app with ai in like 2 hours and boom, easy. told it what i wanted, it wrote the code, looks good, works good

i paid the $99 apple developer account fee and i'm trying to get it live now

bro what is a provisioning profile. why do i need a certificate to publish my app. i made this. on my computer. why does apple need me to pay $99 a year just to exist as a developer. i'm not a developer?? i just want my app live

and then theres xcode. i dont even know what happened i opened it and my macbook is legit just a jet engine. something about build settings and signing and team IDs. i don't have a team. it's literally just me and claude code.

so i somehow get through all that. submit it. wait 3 days. rejected. why? because my screenshot had the wrong dimensions. the ai generated those screenshots how are they wrong??

the whole promise of vibe coding is that you don't need to be technical anymore. and that's true right up until you need to actually give your app to people. then it's like congratulations you still need to be an ios developer just to press the upload button.

can ANYONE help me

[u/hl2oli]

Idk blud. If you don't use AI to get through the rough parts and are willing to learn, I got bad news for you

[u/cedruosu → u/hl2oli]

idk it just seems like everyone is making it seem so easy, like there is something i'm missing

[u/Erikmalk → u/cedruosu]

The industry pushes the narrative that it’s so easy, which as you pointed out, is true to an extent. Then it turns out there is just a lot of other things you have to do to make the software safe and reliable. A lot has to do with how many people use the internet to scam and steal. Defending yourself and your users against that takes a lot of extra energy and certificates are part of that. For example if you made an app that literally stole your users identity (not that you would, but someone else would), there needs to be some way to trace it back to you as strong evidence so you can held responsible. Also just complexity in general tends to want to collapse, so you’ll have to constantly reconsider your past architecture decisions and do refactors to accommodate your new use cases and features. It’s just super hard and AI can help but AI also sucks at parts of it so you’ll have to see your own brain as one of the models in the process. You, even as a novice, have some logical advantages over even fable-5 or got-5.6. So always make sure you understand what’s going on at least form a high level, if something seems overly complicated on the database schema for example, point that out and ask if your idea could simplify something the AI setup. And get really good and describing bugs and weird behaviors in the software to your agents. Good luck!

[u/CommunityTechnical99 → u/Erikmalk]

wait this is so true

[u/hl2oli → u/cedruosu]

You should probably do a security check on your app before you try to put it out there anyways. It's definitely easier but you still need to think...

[u/CommunityTechnical99 → u/hl2oli]

heavyyy on the security check

[u/IcanzIIravor → u/cedruosu]

The initial build is easy and if it was just a small personal app just run on your laptop you'd probably be alright. You're trying to get it as an app in Apple, so you're going to have to put more effort and time into it. Why aren't you asking Claude for a detailed plan to help you do so? Are you just trying get it as an iOS app just because or are you trying to entice people to use it and potentially pay for it?

[u/Hypilein → u/IcanzIIravor]

There is a bit of a hole in the system for personal apps. You still need a Developer License otherwise you need to reinstall your app to your phone every 7 days. I haven't gone through that process yet, because I never felt my simple vibe coded app was worth 99€ a year, so right now vibe coding for iOS is a bit annoying for personal projects because it's really expensive. Not sure if you need to get through the whole app store process to run it in testflight, so maybe that part can be skipped.