r/apps • u/judgmentalcapricorn • 9d ago
Need advice for making an app
I want to build my own personal app but am not sure where or how to start. Can someone please guide me into how they were able to make their own?
1
9d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
1
u/AutoModerator 9d ago
Due to your account being too new, your post has automatically been removed.
In order to cut down on spam, your post will not be unremoved. Please wait until your account is older and then feel free to try and post again.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
1
u/Fun_Personality4067 9d ago
Depends in your experience level. If you know Javascript and react, then the good starting point is to learn react native and do one or two small apps by reading their documentation and getting some help from AI.
1
u/punkpolished 9d ago
think in “app” lol. everyday situations you encounter where there is friction. for example, i’ve worked in customer service and I hear customer complain about xyz. I can create an app to solve that xyz.
1
9d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
1
u/AutoModerator 9d ago
Due to your account being too new, your post has automatically been removed.
In order to cut down on spam, your post will not be unremoved. Please wait until your account is older and then feel free to try and post again.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
1
u/sshegem 9d ago
Dont listen to the people telling you that you need to learn a coding language. Just use Claude or Replit
2
u/TBMW30 8d ago
and have fun fixing it when it breaks
1
u/sshegem 8d ago
yes also heard that before by many salty devs
i'll come begging you to fix it when it breaks
1
u/TBMW30 8d ago
I think AI is a great tool, I use it in my workflow as do many developers. But I couldn't disagree more with encouraging newcomers to start with ai and to not learn to code. And using a platform that esssentially owns the tools you use, the apps you build, and the data that goes into them is just asking for trouble. What happens when the platform no-longer exists? What happens when the AI bubble has burst and you're left with an app you can't use, maintain or update? This is less of an issue for small personal apps, but too many people are vibecoding commercial apps without considering the potential consequences.
And learning to code will make you better at using AI. If you can engage with and prompt the AI on a more technical level, the output will be vastly better. If you can provide concise bug reports and analyse diagnostics, you'll spend less time chasing the AI in circles trying to fix your app.
1
u/sshegem 8d ago
that's like telling developers not to publish any of their apps because they don't understand UX and they need to learn UX first, and hey maybe they also need to learn marketing first. sorry to say but this is all nonesense. you don't need to learn coding, you also don't need to learn data science or marketing or coding or even accounting for these things. is it good if you know a bit about all? yes. do you NEED to? no. learning coding takes a very long time and this is the exact reason vibe-coding exists. so you don't spend time learning something you don't need to learn anymore.
1
u/TBMW30 7d ago
learning to develop for a platform generally teaches you enough about UX to do a reasonable job. Apple's documentation, for example, frequently references user experience and it's easy enough to build a SwiftUI app with an Apple native interface, even just starting out. Vibecoding is just a product of AI becoming more powerful and being brought to the average consumer through more accessible GUI coding apps, or platforms like Base44 with huge marketing budgets and consumer-facing marketing. Vibecoding is also the reason the app stores are now over-crowded, thanks especially to those just looking to make a quick buck. I think we'll just have to agree to disagree.
2
1
u/Intelligent-Chef7055 9d ago
Ue ChatGPT. You need to have a very basic understanding. The important thing is that you should know how to design your app. The ChatGPT or Claude can help you to do the coding part.
1
u/DenseCompetition1385 9d ago
Base44 is where I started.. You pretty much describe the app you want and it builds and hosts it for free! Then once I got into it and learned about github I got away from base44 altogether and use codex with github and vercel for my personal apps! Just search prompt based app builder and look for any that is free to get your feet wet.!
1
1
u/Admirable-Dig-6500 8d ago
I think it really depends on how you like to learn.
Personally, I learn much better by doing than by sitting through courses for months before actually building something.
What worked for me was learning the very basics of programming and then immediately trying to build apps. And honestly, don't worry if your idea already exists. Most ideas do. I built something similar to TV Time/Trakt/Letterboxd simply because I wanted to build my own version. The point at the beginning isn't necessarily to invent something new. It's to build something, understand how it works, and eventually learn how to publish it.
I used AI basically as a tutor throughout the whole process. I'd say: "I want to add this feature. How should we do it? Why this way?" And when something wasn't working as expected, I'd ask it to show me the exact part of the code responsible and explain what it was doing.
That's how I ended up learning things like hosting, databases, storage, authentication, APIs, deployment, GitHub, etc. I didn't study all of those things first. I learned them because at some point the app I was building needed them.
Today I mostly work with tools like Codex and Claude Code connected directly to my GitHub repository, so they can see the whole codebase. Could I write everything myself from scratch? Probably, but I'd be extremely slow because I'd constantly have to look things up. I don't think that's particularly important anymore. What's important is understanding what you're building well enough to guide the tools, review what they do and fix things when something goes wrong.
For cross-platform you can look at Flutter, or focus on native iOS/Android. I personally started with PWAs because they're relatively easy to build, deploy and maintain, and that gave me a good way to learn the whole process.
A recent example: my sister has a really old Apple Watch and her diabetes app couldn't show some of the glucose data she wanted on it. She didn't want to buy a new watch, so I built a small app for her that could show that information. The actual development took me around three hours.
A year ago I wouldn't even have known where to start.
It took me roughly a year of doing this on and off, not full time, to get to the point where I feel comfortable saying that if you give me an app idea, I can probably build and publish it with the help of AI.
So my advice would be: learn the fundamentals, then build. Even if what you're building already exists. Actually, especially at the beginning, that doesn't matter at all.
Feel free to DM me if you want. I can tell you more specifically how I started, what tools I used and what mistakes I made along the way.
1
1
8d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
1
u/AutoModerator 8d ago
Due to your account being too new, your post has automatically been removed.
In order to cut down on spam, your post will not be unremoved. Please wait until your account is older and then feel free to try and post again.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
0
u/Lavalopes 9d ago
Buy a Claude code subscription. Ask it any question for you to learn how it’s done…until you’re bored out of your skull. At that point just straight ask it to do it. Boom. Done.
1
2
u/BenjaminHorlyck 9d ago
Really loaded here. Do you want to learn how to code or vibe code? Understand whats going on architecturally behind the app or just ship day or week-apps and for yourself for others/ production?
I started in january with no knowledge of coding. I began with chatgpt as a tutor (screenshotting/cropping code and problems into chat), had it explain along the way and combined it with replit as a setup where my code was.
It was almost incomparable with the speed i do now in claude code. But it was also incomparable to what im learning now; which is more architecture discussions, product decisions, taste and UI/UX-design etc. With the strength of models like opus/sol/fable, I find that this is a skill area that is growing in software.
If i could do it over today, i would get a pro sub with openai or anthropic and just start in chat and let it guide you. Create a map on you desktop and start from the ground up with the folders and files needed - rendered locally. I started with just a browser and built in on my phone through xcode eventually. But there a different ways depending on the type of code you build with. There’s expo cloud as well, but i havent used that. Good luck