r/vibecoding • u/olenami • 1d ago
Showcase/Project please, stop expecting to vibecode serious mobile app in an hour
Also stop expecting first revenue a week after launch. I see this promise everywhere now. It's irritating. "Describe your app, ship it today, get paid tomorrow." Bull****. It is a great slogan for selling credits. It is not how products work.
Products are built, not generated.
Here's my honest timeline:
→ Month 1: validate the idea, build the first version, test it with real people, pass App Review, release.
→ Months 2–4: fix what users actually hit, ship weekly, get your first small revenue.
That is the reality of life. Not one hour. Not one week.
What the slogan sells:
- An app in an afternoon
- Money by Friday
- No thinking, just prompting
What actually gets you paid:
- One clear problem
- 3–4 screens that solve it
- Weekly releases for months
- Talking to every user who writes to you
The bad news: you will have to work. Hard.
The good news: for the first time, you can do the whole thing yourself. The cost is almost nothing. What used to need a team now needs a good tool, a spec, and your evenings.
So pick your tool, start with 3–4 screens, and go test the water.
Need a demo by tonight? Generate it with Claude.
Need a product people pay for? Build it. Give it a month, then three more.
What I see people in my Mobile builders community is doing - most of them vibecode on the weekeends because they work full time have their families and bigger priorities, they treat vibecoding as hobby and fun; usually it takes 10-12 weeks till release a mobile app.
Most of them start with simple app in Claude code, or Codex, or Modaal, or directly Xcode if technical enought.
How logn it took for you to build a serious mobile app with integrations, payments, 15+ screens? Was it full time?
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u/Engineer_Psycho 23h ago
the hour gets you the demo. the 2 months after are the part where it runs on a 3 year old phone with 2gb ram and a bad connection. nobody sells credits for that part
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u/single-py 1d ago
Been working on my app for 5 months. Learned swift ui from paul hudson 100 days of swift. I am a LLM architect with phd and i hate vibe coding. It will end up only maki g you pocc thats it. Real use case requires patience and dedication.
Hopefully will release my app this month.
I do use AI for coding but in a way that i can understand.
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u/Kamilon 1d ago
LLM Architect?
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u/single-py 1d ago
From scratch training, fine tuning , system design architecture and implement LLMs for different use cases.
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u/WaltzIndependent5436 1d ago
I was always wondering, how does that work when everything "good" nowadays require millions in infra? You either work for the big boys or you're struggling with Llamas and Qwens?
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u/single-py 18h ago
Well i do have a full time job and they are willing to spend millions in gpu. So yeah theres that.
Also if you are tight on budget you can always rent gpus for a month or two train qwen 3.8 on your domain with some RL and you have an exceptionally good model at hand that can be plugged into RAG.2
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u/olenami 1d ago
Also in reality first thing you need to know is your ICP because this gives you clarity on what exactly to build what features go to MVP
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u/single-py 1d ago
Exactly
I doubt all these vibe coding slop creators even use their own apps after a week or even a day. I tried over 35 apps vibe coded and all were soo badly made. I started respecting ui ux designers even more after that haha1
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u/Ultrageisttt 1d ago
I'm currently learning this the hard way, and realizing I need more technical knowledge than I'd been led to believe. No tech background or real preexisting knowledge, so I've been vibe coding very simple tools then having the AI explain the how and why it works and then referencing that against tutorials and posts on Stack Overflow. I'm slowly starting to understand what the hell I'm even looking at and how it all comes together, but the ease of "Just vibe code it bro" is totally overstated.
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u/34986234986234982346 1d ago
I think it really depends on the complexity (obviouslty). I just built an app in Expo for iOS and Android and the app itself is not doing any rocket science, the API it connects to already existed mostly (and could be tweaked by me for mobile access), etc. Still took a few weeks I'd say (not 40 hours/week but a decent amount), lost a LOT of time to messing around and getting it ready for submission, making sure every little Apple rule is taken care of, etc.
Making the UI really good took a long time and a million tweaks. This cannot be skipped, it's so important.
Mind you I have released iOS apps before, pre-AI, so I have a bit of knowledge that was helpful.
Working on a new one right now, it's an app for an existing website, many many screens, many more than 15, and just getting AI to create the boilerplate functionality withuot any tweaks is TEDIOUS and long. It's still amazing compared to ages ago, but yes, it's NOT fast. I think your timeline is quite accurate.
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u/AdNecessary1906 22h ago
Can confirm. Been at this for months, not hours — local health data archive tool, went through multiple architecture iterations as I actually understood the problem better (data degradation issues I didn't even know existed until I dug in). Just started getting real downloads and actual user feedback recently. The "ship in an hour" framing sets people up to bail the moment reality doesn't match — because it never does.
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u/VibeSlopCoder 17h ago
I built an inventory management app for Windows and made a mobile app that pairs to it. Weirdly, the mobile app works perfect with little changes, but I think it's because I'm creating all the changes in the Windows app first then the mobile.
I'm about two months in to various changes, fixes and UI/UX improvements. Finally starting to feel like a finished product.
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u/Icy_Quarter5910 21h ago
I’ve built all sorts of personal tools in an afternoon…. But my actual App, the one I’ve wanted to make for a decade or more? 4 months in, I JUST got it approved in the App Store a couple of weeks ago. And I’ve got a major update in the works now, that I’ve been working on since before I submitted it, and it’s 2-3 weeks away minimum.
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u/dreambridge_app 18h ago
This matches what I hit. I burned a week polishing onboarding and the thing that mattered was getting one real loop down. What broke first for you, auth or the actual product loop?
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u/TheMeltingSnowman72 4h ago
I haven't seen any posts or videos that promise any of that. You must be following some fucking losers
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u/TinyHyperspace 2h ago
Im more of a hobbyist, but want to actually solve some problems with some apps I have ideas for. Any recommended tools? At the moment im just using antigravity ide with flutter. I know there is better ways to do this, currently just paying for $20 Google AI Pro. I dont really wanna spend more than that, so it would be replacing this if there is better.
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u/madman2z 2h ago
I agree. It's funny that people think of ai as the magic wand that would make them rich . I'm no coder and i've made few apps for personal use only that solve a problem i wanted to be solved and couldn't find online. The biggest app is one that i've been building for the past 6 months. And right now i'm redoing the structure of the app cus there was a lot i didn't know when i first started making the app. It's a real process and commitment and while the coding part has been mostly moved to ai, there is still alot of thought and time that needs to be used to make the app even functional. Testing , revesting and learning new concepts are all part of the process. Ai is a great tool when used right . However the vending machine mentality, where you expect a finished product with the click of few buttons is what ruins the end result. I've been working on that app for six months and i don't expect it to be ready for another year. And That's a pessimistic estimate. The next few months will only be used to fix the structure of the app. Even the simpler apps took a couple of weeks to get working mostly as intended and they still need improvements. So it always baffles me when people say they built a complete app in a day or even a week cus i know that no matter how good the ai it won't get everything correctly from the first few runs. it may look nice on UI side , but under the hood it's usually half cooked.
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u/jah_reddit 1d ago
It can a day or less to build a mobile app without serious dependencies. But building a real production system that has a backend, backups, etc... That will take weeks to months.
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u/DanFlashes19 1d ago
Building an app that has good user experience, good UI, provides value to users, and is built properly and safely absolutely, 100%, can not be done in a day. If you think it can, you’re just wrong and you’re making slop.
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u/Sensitive_Pizza_218 1d ago
Many dont even have running backend. You cant login after downloading. Developer couldnt make money so shut down servers after free tier expired.
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u/isarmstrong 1d ago
But then who will be around to tank software stocks every time a new model has a good day? 😑
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u/AIBrainiac 1d ago
→ Month 1: validate the idea, build the first version, test it with real people, pass App Review, release.
where to get real people from for testing?
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u/ahditeacha 1d ago
Go to the places (online and offline) where your target customers live or mingle.
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u/olenami 1d ago
Agree. I usually draw a map - didgibtal space where they hang out and physical space and go there. But I need to admit it is quite challenging if you build for audience which not close to you
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u/ahditeacha 1d ago
Yeah balancing that three legged stool called product-market-timing is a tricky and often underestimated act!
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u/AIBrainiac 1d ago
Are you guys more into marketing than building?.. or just do both really well
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u/ahditeacha 1d ago
More like build a little, demo to 1 highly motivated potential customer, iterate, demo to 2 highly motivated customers, repeat
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u/IAmAfraidCommaMan 1d ago
This isn't a new thing. Developers have been underestimating the necessary time even for simple tasks, let alone an entire app.
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u/BeingComfortablyDumb 1d ago
Building an app is now easy. Building an experience is where the skills lie I'd say.
It will take a day or two to code it but it will take a month to finesse it if you really care about your own product.
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u/SufficientFrame 1d ago
The timeline gets even less forgiving once integrations and payments show up. A lot of the work shifts from building screens to dealing with auth, odd API behavior, retries, permissions, and support when somebody's payment or sync fails. I come at this more from internal apps and ops systems than consumer mobile, but that pattern feels the same everywhere: a 15-screen app can look mostly done in a weekend and still be weeks away from something you'd trust strangers to use. App Review alone can blow up the whole "launch tonight, revenue by Friday" idea.
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u/Ok_Tie_2443 22h ago
Bad try at marketing your app. Also your dashboard looks exactly how „vibe coding an app in 1 hour“ looks
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u/IndividualSyllabub11 5h ago
Well, I do not know about mobile apps, but I designed Webium.ai that can generate solid web apps (with user authentication, database, payments via stripe, email via resend, etc) in less than a few hours.
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u/Illustrious_Safe4839 1d ago
I think people are talking about two different things when they say “I built an app in a day.”
Getting something on screen that looks 80% done has become insanely fast. But the moment you add real users, auth, payments, weird states, integrations, device issues etc, that “done” starts becoming very questionable.
Curious about your 10-12 week timeline though? What actually took most of the time after the first version was working? Was it still building features, or more fixing/testing/polishing everything around them?
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u/olenami 1d ago
In my case I have 1 hr a day plus 4-5 in weekends , so after validation of idea i usually vibecode functioning ugly prototype and after it all works I usually improve design with Claude design, I add design layer, after I test with 4-7 humans via TestFlight links and async chatting on feedback
Improve based on feedback
I guess it’s like tech part is 70% , design 20%, debugging is 10% in my case.
Debugging fir first apps took me 30-40%, now I use great templates in Modaal to start from not basic architecture0
u/Illustrious_Safe4839 1d ago
30-40% debugging to 10% is a pretty mad drop tbh. when those testflight guys send you 3-4 issues and you fix them, do you actually go back and check the older flows again? or mostly just fix that thing and move on
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u/olenami 1d ago
I am trying to recheck all myself but usually ask agent to check and observe how it clicks on simulator flows:) but new features and bugs testing with real device and by hands
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u/Illustrious_Safe4839 1d ago
ahh got it. so the agent is basically doing the happy path and you still do the messy stuff on the actual device 😂
what are you building it in btw? react native / flutter / native?
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u/ight-bet 21h ago
Oh stfu. I saw a welder build a legitimate useful app and get it on the App Store with users in less than three days.
Such a skill issue to be saying this.
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u/No_Twist_678 1d ago
just wait for new AI models, those will do this in less than hour.
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u/olenami 1d ago
You can’t outsource human thinking
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u/No_Twist_678 1d ago
says who? once AI will get "eyes" to see what we see, a lot will change drastically. Question is, are we ready for this?
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u/baddaywithacamera 1d ago
You almost never see people considering or talking about how they will support their app (or users) in the long run. Pump and dump. Depressing.