Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Building and shipping Mac and iOS apps without opening Xcode

scottwillsey.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 248 posts

Re: Building and shipping Mac and iOS apps without opening Xcode

#51

Post by datadrivenangel »

rvz wrote: post #16

By using "Claude Code"* * and giving Anthropic all your secrets, env vars, certificates and your source code to them.

I've used opencode on a plane with local models to make small updates to local MacOS apps. It's not fast or amazing, but it does work well enough to do trivial changes.

But also yes this is a real concern.

Re: Building and shipping Mac and iOS apps without opening Xcode

#52

Post by mulmboy »

I went to build an open source app from GitHub and was pretty surprised that it requires Xcode and that Xcode can't really be installed without an apple id. I do not want to make one and I certainly will not sign my computer into one.

I did end up somehow installing Xcode via some shady download and was on my way. But the whole ordeal left a very sour taste.

Re: Building and shipping Mac and iOS apps without opening Xcode

#53

Post by murlax »

Tangentially, I despise Xcode and love the Expo ecosystem and all the lovely tooling that they have built. It is React Native but Expo honestly makes it so trivial to build stuff from the CLI without ever needing to open that abomination of an app. And with AI, I have built a lot of side project apps onto my iPhone, like a homelab app for monitoring my cameras with push notifications whenever someone is at the door, starting my irrigation and a whole lot more. Plus Tailscale of course. Kind of a crazy world that we live in now.

Re: Building and shipping Mac and iOS apps without opening Xcode

#54

Post by sefrost »

murlax wrote: post #53

Tangentially, I despise Xcode and love the Expo ecosystem and all the lovely tooling that they have built. It is React Native but Expo honestly makes it so trivial to build stuff from the CLI without ever needing to open that abomination of an app. And with AI, I have built a lot of side project apps onto my iPhone, like a homelab app for monitoring my cameras with push notifications whenever someone is at the door,…

Yes, I remember React Native being quite painful before Expo!

Upgrading from one version to the next especially so.

Expo seems to shield you from a lot of issues, without really taking any power away from you either.

Re: Building and shipping Mac and iOS apps without opening Xcode

#55

Post by CharlesW »

zuzululu wrote: post #20
CharlesW wrote: post #8

If it's okay to mention my own complementary open source project, Axiom¹ does a good job of helping coding harnesses know how to do this effectively for Apple OS development. In addition to a deep roster of skills and agencts, Axiom includes several for-LLM tools². xclog , xcprof , xcsym , and xcui are designed to be used by LLMs, and expose capabilities in a token-efficient way. These tools are equally helpful for n…

will it work with flutter ?

Axiom covers only native APIs and tools, but the Flutter team maintains what looks like a nice set of skills at https://github.com/flutter/agent-plugins, and the Dart team at https://github.com/dart-lang/skills.

Re: Building and shipping Mac and iOS apps without opening Xcode

#57

Post by sneak »

mulmboy wrote: post #52

I went to build an open source app from GitHub and was pretty surprised that it requires Xcode and that Xcode can't really be installed without an apple id. I do not want to make one and I certainly will not sign my computer into one. I did end up somehow installing Xcode via some shady download and was on my way. But the whole ordeal left a very sour taste.

Though the primary way of installing Xcode is via MAS (requiring Apple ID login), Xcode can be downloaded from the Apple Developer website without an ADP membership, though you do have to log in to the website with an Apple ID. You don’t have to log into the Mac with an Apple ID though, you can then install and use it on a Mac without an Apple ID (though you will need one inside Xcode to sign apps to get them to run on an iOS device).

Re: Building and shipping Mac and iOS apps without opening Xcode

#60

Post by mvkel »

In my experience, the better long-term choice if you're going to vibe code an app is to use Expo.

Its basis is React, so the code output quality is much higher than Swift because there is much more React code in LLM training data.

Everything is in the command line, and debugging is a breeze because it's a web view. But once it's compiled to native iOS, it feels like any other native app.

Expo + Fastlane = fully automated iOS submission and deployment. I issue one command and see a new version in the App Store.

Post reply on HN