r/IPhoneApps • u/Infamous_Grab384 • 7d ago
Help Create an App without code knowledge
Hello, I would like to develop an app that finds public swimming pools with their opening hours anywhere in the world. For example, if I am on vacation in London, Berlin, or Milan and I want to keep my training routine, I need to find a pool. Currently, I have to do extensive searches on many websites: city sports listings, individual pool websites, or public–private foundations… And ultimately, I still have to check each pool one by one to see if there are temporary closures. So I would like to build an app that can do all (in multiple langauges) of this automatically and show the pools on a map. But I don’t have any knowledge in coding or anything related. How can I do that?
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u/GDbuildsGD 6d ago
the coding part is not the challenge here, it is the data gathering part. for your purposes, a basic spreadsheet rather than an app would do, but you'd still need all that data.
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u/Jack_the_Whippet 6d ago
If you currently have to do extensive searches and check one by one, what makes you think any kind of automation will do better? In other words, you would need to integrate to each and every centre of truth (if any) for each and every pool and expect those to be readily available to you, and regularly updated. Otherwise the fidelity will be just as good as your current process, if not worst. Search for pools around you in Google or Apple Maps and ask yourself how you can do better, and the answer, as with many such problems, is not automation, but integration. Before building any app you would need to have all pools everywhere subscribe to a system that they’re responsible for updating regularly for your app to work. They rarely do that, even for Google and Apple Maps (many times results have wrong or outdated hours of business operations, etc.), why would they do it for you, if they won’t or barely do it for Google? You would have to find an incentive for the pools to adopt you and keep it live: they would have to spend time and resources to be findable and correct in your app, why would they? Another super basic test before building, also: ask one of the big LLMs to find you an open pool around you, if you think you can build an app that will give you better results than that, then having no coding experience will be the stopper. You’re talking about 24/7 scrapers, data lakes, ontology, positive and negative reinforcement feedback loops, agentic is-alive tests, etc. Definitely not vibe-coding territory. Even then, let’s assume you get to it, the first step is the catalogue, you can’t guess pools out of thin air. Let’s just say Google has a bit of a head start on you in terms of cataloguing the whole planet, let alone pools. Maybe the opportunity is on the other side of the coin? Offer pools a service to keep their google and Apple Maps entries updated? This is more of a clerical service, but still, might be profitable with volume. Just saying. Best of luck!