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.
Thanks for the heads up. I confess, I did not test it on an SE. We'll take a look!
Launch HN: Bitrig (YC S25) – Build Swift apps on your iPhone
31–40 of 128 posts
Re: Launch HN: Bitrig (YC S25) – Build Swift apps on your iPhone
#32Doesn’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.
Re: Launch HN: Bitrig (YC S25) – Build Swift apps on your iPhone
#33I’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!
Yeah, the prompt is just asking Claude to generate a SwiftUI iPhone app. The recent models have been able to generate really good Swift code, so we just have a set of best practice instructions we've been accumulating (telling it to make an app with @main, pointing it to/away from some APIs, encouraging it to persist things in UserDefaults, etc).
I think most of that would work pretty well for making SwiftUI desktop apps too.
Re: Launch HN: Bitrig (YC S25) – Build Swift apps on your iPhone
#34Hey 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.
Ya, I agree it makes sense for us to record a more tutorial length demo at this point and we can show off things like that.
Thanks for the tip about the mic. Fun fact: it's me in the video, but it's Jacob doing the narration :P
Re: Launch HN: Bitrig (YC S25) – Build Swift apps on your iPhone
#35First, 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'.)
Re: Launch HN: Bitrig (YC S25) – Build Swift apps on your iPhone
#36It 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!
Re: Launch HN: Bitrig (YC S25) – Build Swift apps on your iPhone
#37Doesn’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.…
Sorry about that, I reset your free messages for the day, so you should be back at 5.
Moving in and out of the project while messages are sending is a more fragile area of the app and we have some bugs to fix there.
Re: Launch HN: Bitrig (YC S25) – Build Swift apps on your iPhone
#38I’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!
Yeah, the prompt is just asking Claude to generate a SwiftUI iPhone app. The recent models have been able to generate really good Swift code, so we just have a set of best practice instructions we've been accumulating (telling it to make an app with @main, pointing it to/away from some APIs, encouraging it to persist things in UserDefaults, etc). I think most of that would work pretty well for making SwiftUI desktop…
It would be lovely if the community had this knowledge about API's to avoid and approached to adopt. SwiftUI programming is a tightrope walk of stuff that works over a chasm of time lost to testing.
Re: Launch HN: Bitrig (YC S25) – Build Swift apps on your iPhone
#39First, 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…
Don't tell anyone, but once you're on the paid plan we're not actually enforcing the 100 message limit right now ;)
We're still in the learning phase, and are going to adjust the plans based on exactly the kind of considerations you're raising
Re: Launch HN: Bitrig (YC S25) – Build Swift apps on your iPhone
#40Seems 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 us…
That’s interesting, on a desktop device I would agree. However having to create an account on 1Password for an app I just want to try is a pain compared to using Apple’s Hide my email and entering in the OTP. I get that it didn’t work for you but it did for me.
It’s 2 extra button clicks to generate a password and save it on 1Password, and you never have to leave your current context.
Versus for email OTP you have to switch to your email client, find the email, perhaps refresh a few times waiting for it to come in, click into the email once you see it, highlight the OTP, click copy, then switch back to the app and finally paste. I don’t understand how anybody could possibly prefer it.