This is such a romantic idea, but unfortunately Apple and Google are hostile to this model.
Of the two, iOS is /worst/ for running vibe coded apps.
You need to pay $99 a year to be an Apple developer if you want your app to live on your phone for more than a a week.
Distribution is a also pain in the ass even for personal use alone (you can't just toss around an IPA).
Finally, so many useful APIs are totally locked up. The fact that I cannot in 2026 extend Siri, for example, us infuriating.
Android is far more promising but Google recently shot themselves in the foot with their verified APK nonsense. Google's privacy posture is infamously nonexistent as well, and I have little interest in rooting a Pixel at my age.
Hopefully now that enough people can vibe code, these walls will crumble a bit.
I ran across WebXDC this past weekend, and I'm intrigued. I've built a few apps on it already, and I'm very pleasantly surprised by how cleverly inverted the whole model is (in combination with ChatMail). Delta Chat is available on iOS, I believe. I use Arcanechat on Android.
https://webxdc.org/
https://chatmail.at/
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/delta-chat/id1459523234
https://arcanechat.me/
The beauty of the ecosystem is that apps are just zips of a webapp that is self-contained, and uses the webxdc api to message other copies of itself running on other folks' phones that are part of that chat group. Basically, the app communicates (and is distributed over!) the group chat (it's otherwise insulated from the internet). And because apps are just zipped webapps, they can be pulled apart, hacked on, and reassembled as needed for your group.
ChatMail relays tend not to retain info - they aren't hosts, they just relay encrypted messages (the platform mandates encryption). This sidesteps all the approval/review processes, and there is no app store or developer fee or even SDK. It's just folks trading apps and running them together.
It can't solve a lot of cases, but it solves some use cases (like a shared grocery list, or real-time card games, or games with leaderboards) really well.
Interesting. What apps have you built? How/where is state maintained?
Yeah, it's a pretty fascinating architecture. I already have a side project called AppDeck where I've been buliding out a WebDAV server and a suite of HTML apps that know how to save modified copies of themselves back to the server. I've been using it for a couple of years, and the suite is growing - tools, apps, games, etc.
My son had written a game like this called "Quantum Chain" that had basic leaderboard functionality. That was the first app we ported: the platform injects the webcdx.js shim, and we update Quantum Chain to post messages to it when someone finished a game with a high score. This is replicated out to the relays the same way every message in the group chat is. When the app fires up, Delta/ArcaneChat replay all messages that are typed for that app back to it, and it restores it's state that way. There's some localstorage caching to make this a bit more efficient as the stream grows.
So it's a bit like several services reading off the same kafka stream to stay in sync.
I've since ported over (and massive improved) my implementation of KenKen, which also has leaderboards. I then took on realtime gameplay: a card game my family likes called "Shithead" that supports 2-6 players. I built a first version in about 6 hours, and I'm still working out session management (so folks can join and leave games and everything syncs properly). Still a couple of edge cases to fix, but overall, it been trivially easy to bring over webapps to the platform that already exist, and a few hours of effort to create a new one.
I'm pretty thrilled with the whole ecosystem, as it gets me away from all the BS the companies have layered on top of the basic "Apps with Friends" experience ArcaneChat offers.
Related: You can perfectly well upload WebXDC's to your "Saved Messages" channel (the channel where you DM yourself) to have a single user app running on the platform. It already has close to 200 apps of various sorts you can try from the default "app directory", but of course any site can be used as the directory.
A PWA might be well suited to your needs. Even Apple's restrictive model leaves plenty of room to build useful apps especially if they are designed to connect to a backend (like the ones in the post).
I have used PWAs and online web apps for a lot of my vibe coded tools, but sometimes you just want/need native features and performance.
I totally hear you on that, but for my one off apps (and even some of my not one off apps) if I can't implement a feature in a PWA, I just learn to live without that feature.
You don't need to pay Apple $99.
You can make perfectly good apps that run great with a free account. They expire in a week instead of 3 months (for TestFlight builds). That's it. You can redeploy with minimal effort. You have to reauth with Apple every ~30 days. The reauth is the only part of that you can't have a cron job run (you need to authenticate the keychain).
For normie folks, the hoops here are mildly annoying. But if you're someone making vibe-coded apps, we're talking about two scripts and a cron job, here. Or just run Sideloadly, which I hear works pretty well.
There exist reasons to be annoyed by Apple's iOS security posture, but "I can't run my vibecoded apps" isn't an especially good one.
> You can redeploy with minimal effort.
Can I ask what your workflow is for this "minimal effort"? Maybe I'm missing something, as I thought it would require manual faffing with laptop, Xcode, etc. every week?
(PS I've tried the two prominent sideloading approaches, but couldn't get either of them to work on my iPhone.)
AltStore, Sideloadly, SideStore all have mechanisms for automating the weekly redeploys, to name a few.
> You can redeploy with minimal effort every week
No thank you
Indeed No thank you. Tried this with my personal habit tracker. Had to login again with my Apple ID so often and right when I needed my app it expired (good luck if you don’t have your laptop with you). Converted it into a PWA and be done with it. Weekly redeploys are a big PIA. A pity you cannot use an iPhone for personal projects.
App Store will be the place to download apps you can't avoid, like your bank's client.
For personal apps, the locked down stores are making themselves irrelevant. When you have software for one person, you don't want to publish it there. You want to bypass the gatekeepers.
Which is why computer freedom is so important it needs to be enshrined into law. Stuff like remote attestation, locked down boot loaders and "app stores" need to be made literally illegal. Ownership of the computer should be a constitutional right.
It still holds for the desktop, though. LLMs have helped me quickly code new software for lab equipment (total users ~6), a research tool for my partner, and for several desktop apps I just use for me.
Two apps fill niches that I've wanted to code myself (one, I've wanted to code for the last twenty years on and off), but have never had the time to do so. Now, the speed from thought to working prototype is insane (less than an hour); it then takes a few days of occasional work to turn that prototype into something architecturally sound and half-decent.
And after that... well, I just keep improving, refactoring, refining, because it's so much fun.
Local first is a model I'm exploring. Combined with PWA it's pretty good and doesn't need to be native. LLMs are most useful for apps that are Good Enough™ anyway, and struggle with the remaining 5-10%.
For most people I believe it's a good exchange for the value of a more secure device.
But yes, I don't really want to pay Apple $100 a year just to run my apps. So I just have them as PWAs. Wouldn't work for many use cases, like when you need Apple Fitness data, but works for me and it looks fine.
> rooting a Pixel at my age
Don't do that, that's a PITA. Put GrapheneOS on it instead—simple, no hassle, works great
Oh no! $99! If you're rich enough to have bought into the Apple walled garden, $99 is nothing. Can't go out for a nice dinner with the family for less than that these days. Yeah it would be great if Apple gave it away for free, but it's their walled garden that we've locked ourselves into. My bigger complaint about Apple is how overboard they've gone with the security stuff, making it it that much harder to develop software for their systems, on top of costing more. But, gotta go to where the users are.
> You need to pay $99 a year to be an Apple developer if you want your app to live on your phone for more than a a week.
No complaints over paying more than >$100 a month in subscriptions with coding agents but $99 a year is some how too much?
Yet another reason why “developers” are just consumers that are selective complainers that want their tools to cost $0.00.
Clearly as already stated in the article, hosting and distribution is not free.
> Clearly as already stated in the article, hosting and distribution is not free.
That's the point. We don't want hosting or distribution.
> Clearly as already stated in the article, hosting and distribution is not free.
If I write an app for myself there is no need for hosting or distribution - it costs Apple absolutely nothing, and they don't need to be in the loop.
I've been able to run my own software on my computers forever, and still can on Windows, Mac, and Linux. It's just the mobile OSs that are different, and they shouldn't be. That's what sucks.
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Related, I've been wondering if this issue will hit more and more consumers as vibe-coding personal apps becomes available to more and more people. Apple may have to change this aspect of its model, in time.
> No complaints over paying more than >$100 a month in subscriptions with coding agents
Plenty. The problem isn't so much the price as it is the loss of sovereignty.
It's not your model running on your computer, it's $CORPORATION's model running on their own data centers. They're just generously allowing you to use it, and only on their terms.
Not a matter of money. It's an outright rejection of the "Billionaire-in-the-middle" model that has been eroding the traditional personal computing ownership model.
Just discovered webxdc in another comment here! https://delta.chat/en/2025-01-23-webxdc-no-billionaires
hosting and distributing binaries to one person, who is also the person who created the app is free
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