[monodot]

Fascinated to read this post as I’m doing almost exactly the same thing. Just started using Xcode for the first time, a month ago. I’m not inexperienced with software development, but having to rely mostly on Xcode, Apple’s Developer documentation, information embedded inside WWDC videos, and random forum posts, has been a pretty rough experience.

So Claude has been a massive help, to get to a working app quickly. I am using it in a similar style to the author. Discuss in the UI, try really hard to cherry-pick from the code it generates, while trying to understand what it’s doing. Claude is not clever enough to realise it’s selling you out-of-date APIs, so i feel I need to be super vigilant, which chimes with what folk are saying here about the iOS upgrade treadmill. I’ve supplemented with a couple of technical ebooks as backup.

But the feeling of having your own app, that does something which improves your own life, running on that computer you’ve been carrying in your pocket for years, is extremely rewarding! (In my use case it needs to be an app not a PWA because it needs to integrate with device APIs.)

[dirkc]

> But the feeling of having your own app, that does something which improves your own life, running on that computer you’ve been carrying in your pocket for years, is extremely rewarding!

It's great that you did this, kudos to you!

At the same time it is a little sad to read a statement like this. It used to be so natural for anyone doing software development to write things that improves their lives running on their own devices. Mobile has made this so much more tedious and then you need to ask for permission if you want to share the app.

Last year I also launched my own app on the app store [1], and briefly reflected on the experience [2].

[1] - https://dingdongdoorbell.com/ [2] - https://www.thebacklog.net/2024/10/22/building-and-releasing...