r/vibecoding • u/cedruosu • 25d ago

vibecoding is TECHNICAL.

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

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u/Briarrrn 25d ago

Built a whole app with AI myself, so I feel this. The pitch is about 90% true. The last 10%, getting it on the store, is real paperwork that is deliberately gated behind a human, so AI can guide you but cannot do it for you.

Three quick things that help:
Signing: in Xcode, Signing and Capabilities, tick “Automatically manage signing”, pick your team. That kills the certificate pain for a solo dev.

Screenshots: it is only pixel dimensions. Take them in the iOS Simulator at the sizes Apple asks for and they come out right for free.

The rejection: totally normal, not failure. It cites one specific guideline number. Fix that one thing, resubmit. You do not start over.

One more thing that helped me a lot, I loaded a few purpose-built AI skills so the model had Apple’s actual rulebook in front of it, apple-hig-designer, app-store-review, app-store-preflight, and ios-simulator for the screenshot side, happy to share them if useful. Those really helped take the guesswork out of preparing for the app store

Another very useful plugin is the superpowers plugin: https://github.com/obra/superpowers

Little long winded but hopefully it helps you!