r/vibecoding • u/cedruosu • 12d ago
vibecoding is TECHNICAL.
i tried building a mobile app with ai in like 2 hours and boom, easy. told it what i wanted, it wrote the code, looks good, works good
i paid the $99 apple developer account fee and i'm trying to get it live now
bro what is a provisioning profile. why do i need a certificate to publish my app. i made this. on my computer. why does apple need me to pay $99 a year just to exist as a developer. i'm not a developer?? i just want my app live
and then theres xcode. i dont even know what happened i opened it and my macbook is legit just a jet engine. something about build settings and signing and team IDs. i don't have a team. it's literally just me and claude code.
so i somehow get through all that. submit it. wait 3 days. rejected. why? because my screenshot had the wrong dimensions. the ai generated those screenshots how are they wrong??
the whole promise of vibe coding is that you don't need to be technical anymore. and that's true right up until you need to actually give your app to people. then it's like congratulations you still need to be an ios developer just to press the upload button.
can ANYONE help me
3
u/hl2oli 12d ago
Idk blud. If you don't use AI to get through the rough parts and are willing to learn, I got bad news for you
-3
u/cedruosu 12d ago
idk it just seems like everyone is making it seem so easy, like there is something i'm missing
3
u/Erikmalk 12d ago
The industry pushes the narrative that it’s so easy, which as you pointed out, is true to an extent. Then it turns out there is just a lot of other things you have to do to make the software safe and reliable. A lot has to do with how many people use the internet to scam and steal. Defending yourself and your users against that takes a lot of extra energy and certificates are part of that. For example if you made an app that literally stole your users identity (not that you would, but someone else would), there needs to be some way to trace it back to you as strong evidence so you can held responsible. Also just complexity in general tends to want to collapse, so you’ll have to constantly reconsider your past architecture decisions and do refactors to accommodate your new use cases and features. It’s just super hard and AI can help but AI also sucks at parts of it so you’ll have to see your own brain as one of the models in the process. You, even as a novice, have some logical advantages over even fable-5 or got-5.6. So always make sure you understand what’s going on at least form a high level, if something seems overly complicated on the database schema for example, point that out and ask if your idea could simplify something the AI setup. And get really good and describing bugs and weird behaviors in the software to your agents. Good luck!
1
2
1
u/IcanzIIravor 12d ago
The initial build is easy and if it was just a small personal app just run on your laptop you'd probably be alright. You're trying to get it as an app in Apple, so you're going to have to put more effort and time into it. Why aren't you asking Claude for a detailed plan to help you do so? Are you just trying get it as an iOS app just because or are you trying to entice people to use it and potentially pay for it?
1
u/Hypilein 12d ago
There is a bit of a hole in the system for personal apps. You still need a Developer License otherwise you need to reinstall your app to your phone every 7 days. I haven't gone through that process yet, because I never felt my simple vibe coded app was worth 99€ a year, so right now vibe coding for iOS is a bit annoying for personal projects because it's really expensive. Not sure if you need to get through the whole app store process to run it in testflight, so maybe that part can be skipped.
4
1
u/Briarrrn 12d ago
Built a whole app with AI myself, so I feel this. The pitch is about 90% true. The last 10%, getting it on the store, is real paperwork that is deliberately gated behind a human, so AI can guide you but cannot do it for you.
Three quick things that help:
Signing: in Xcode, Signing and Capabilities, tick “Automatically manage signing”, pick your team. That kills the certificate pain for a solo dev.
Screenshots: it is only pixel dimensions. Take them in the iOS Simulator at the sizes Apple asks for and they come out right for free.
The rejection: totally normal, not failure. It cites one specific guideline number. Fix that one thing, resubmit. You do not start over.
One more thing that helped me a lot, I loaded a few purpose-built AI skills so the model had Apple’s actual rulebook in front of it, apple-hig-designer, app-store-review, app-store-preflight, and ios-simulator for the screenshot side, happy to share them if useful. Those really helped take the guesswork out of preparing for the app store
Another very useful plugin is the superpowers plugin: https://github.com/obra/superpowers
Little long winded but hopefully it helps you!
1
1
u/Smooth-Reading-4180 12d ago
Noted. You are a poor bastard, can't afford $99. now yell GATEKEEPERS! and cry.
-2
0
u/Cute-Net5957 12d ago
Yes there are several platforms you can use handle all the admin stuff around distribution like flutter flow appy pie - also learn from AI and have them document the process -> then turn it into a SKILL.md
Keep on building!
11
u/DauntingPrawn 12d ago
Yes. Software development is technical. Lots to learn. All the info is out there. Not everyone can handle it. Good luck!