Live data from Hacker News

Launch HN: Bitrig (YC S25) – Build Swift apps on your iPhone

news.ycombinator.com

61–70 of 128 posts

Re: Launch HN: Bitrig (YC S25) – Build Swift apps on your iPhone

#61
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.

Re: Launch HN: Bitrig (YC S25) – Build Swift apps on your iPhone

#62
> 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?

Re: Launch HN: Bitrig (YC S25) – Build Swift apps on your iPhone

#63

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

I don't share your assessment. Is it because I did iOS apps before web apps? Curious how many others feel the same? Seems like a reasonable poll question: Which is harder: web app development or native app development? I was telling a younger colleague the other day how back in the day, I was "competing" with a peer at a company doing nuclear design software (Siemens Power Corp at the time). I was doing it in VisualW…

Concern about app security?

Re: Launch HN: Bitrig (YC S25) – Build Swift apps on your iPhone

#64
post #41
post #36

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 v…

Yeah, I think that whole area of dynamically generating UI is really interesting. And having a Swift interpreter like we're using would unlock doing that with native UI components. Our background is more in making developer tools, so bitrig was the first product we were excited about, but I think there's a lot of overlap with dynamic UI generation, and we'd love to explore that too.

Nice. Are you folks thinking about Kotlin/Flutter on Android too, or is it going to be exclusively focused on the ecosystem around Swift?

Re: Launch HN: Bitrig (YC S25) – Build Swift apps on your iPhone

#65

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

I don't share your assessment. Is it because I did iOS apps before web apps? Curious how many others feel the same? Seems like a reasonable poll question: Which is harder: web app development or native app development? I was telling a younger colleague the other day how back in the day, I was "competing" with a peer at a company doing nuclear design software (Siemens Power Corp at the time). I was doing it in VisualW…

native app development is harder not because of some inherent complexity mostly but because you are shipping binaries through 3rd parties you don’t control which makes versioning an annoying problem web devs don’t have to deal with, app review makes true continuous delivery pretty much impossible and also means true rollbacks are pretty much impossible (i know about codepush and expo updates), proprietary core and dev setup limits dev tooling also

Re: Launch HN: Bitrig (YC S25) – Build Swift apps on your iPhone

#66

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 takin…

Wow that's really high praise. Thank you.

Re: Launch HN: Bitrig (YC S25) – Build Swift apps on your iPhone

#69
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.

Re: Launch HN: Bitrig (YC S25) – Build Swift apps on your iPhone

#70

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.

Yeah there’s a Send Feedback button when you’re in a project that sends feedback along with the code for that project.

We also have a discord here: https://discord.com/invite/C7ndWKKq2S

Post reply on HN