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

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

#71

Post by rufugee »

kylemacomber wrote: post #2

On a personal note, I wanted to thank the HN community. I’ve been reading HN since college (for over 15 years now!) and it’s been formative in my development as a software engineer and leader. I don’t pipe up very often, but I visit HN almost every day. Many of the books I read, blogs I frequent, and podcasts I listen to, I found via HN. I think it’s fair to say, if it weren’t for HN, that Bitrig wouldn’t be Bitrig a…

Hello fellow lurker. I for one am glad you are here ;-)

And I echo the thanks. HN has made me a better technical professional in so many ways.

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

#72

Post by lemming »

With vibe coding, I generally find that it will get me 80-90% of the way to where I want to be, but I generally end up having to do some work too. How does that work here? Is there any way to later edit the app on my mac if I need to? Similarly, once my app is "done" for some definition of done, can I compile it into a native app rather than an interpreted one?

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

#73

Post by jacobx »

QuantumNomad_ wrote: post #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’…

We’ve gotten a lot of requests for WebKit, so we’ll try to add it soon.

If we hit issues we can try to pull in just a subset, but one nice thing about Swift is the frameworks have .swiftinterface files which list all the APIs in them, so we’ve generally been able to pull in whole frameworks at a time.

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

#74

Post by jacobx »

pilingual wrote: post #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 a…

Yeah we’d love to find a way to give away more in the free tier for hobbyist users and subsidize that with other things. The idea of us putting an ad in unpaid apps as another option is interesting.

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

#75

Post by jacobx »

ignoramous wrote: post #64
jacobx wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

There’s still a lot to do to make this work really great for the Swift ecosystem, and that’s where we have the most expertise, so that’s what we’ll be focused on for now.

That said, we think this same approach could work really well on Android, and it’d be interesting to expand there too.

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

#76

Post by jacobx »

lemming wrote: post #72

With vibe coding, I generally find that it will get me 80-90% of the way to where I want to be, but I generally end up having to do some work too. How does that work here? Is there any way to later edit the app on my mac if I need to? Similarly, once my app is "done" for some definition of done, can I compile it into a native app rather than an interpreted one?

Yeah that’s been my experience too. You can edit the Swift code directly in bitrig, though editing code on a phone is not the best experience. We’ve had a lot of requests for a Mac app. Stay tuned ;)

You can get a compiled build of your app from bitrig: go to Distribute App which will build your app on our server and then upload it to TestFlight for you (this requires a paid Apple Developer Account). This lets you install the compiled app on your Home Screen. You could also always export the code if you want to build it yourself.

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

#77

Post by jacobx »

7thpixel wrote: post #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.

I think that’s a pretty good list. The main one I would add is “creators will want to make native Swift apps to have a better user experience”

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

#79

Post by rvz »

dcreater wrote: post #68

The data collection is very concerning and is preventing me from using the app though I want to

Given they haven't replied, I assume that they are certainly collecting data from how you are using those prompts to build your apps and also with the outputs.

So don't paste any tokens or keys into these AI tools.

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

#80

Post by saagarjha »

I've been using the app a bit and I like the idea but one of the major things keeping me from using it is that the model is just fundamentally lazy and without having an easy way to review the code on my phone it's not easy to check its work. If it needs to do something which requires talking to a web API it will often just populate the app with fake data silently. Apps for phones are very dependent on web APIs and with people heavily locking this down these days (when's the last time you've used an API that doesn't ask you for an API token?) I feel like most of the apps are limited to being local-only. There are plenty of nice local-only apps on iPhone, don't get me wrong. I'm sure there is a timer app that is just right for everyone. But most of my tasks require more context about my life, or the outside world. Bitrig isn't able to oneshot this yet–but it definitely does make pretty UIs.
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