mcintyre1994 14 hours ago

Okay this is super interesting!

As I was reading this I was a bit confused by the issues they mention, but at work I use Claude SSHed to a persistent dev server and I’d be annoyed if I didn’t have eg my git repos there all the time or any part of that workflow was ephemeral. I’m not really aware of what everyone else is doing with sandboxes etc.

But the bit at the end with the MDM server made it click for me. I’ve started generating tiny iOS apps for personal software stuff, because they solve data storage better than the web (at least on iOS). A database on some other server seems like a bad fit/overkill for this stuff, client side storage is too flaky because Safari. But iOS apps are limiting in their own annoying ways compared to web apps.

This looks like a really interesting solution, I can just store the data on a sprite with SQLite or whatever. Visit its URL to use my app, then does it go away on its own after a short time? I could have done that before with a server with storage, but this seems easier/probably cheaper.

If this works well/the way I’m hoping it might be the sweet spot for simple personal software that needs persistent data and you want to run anywhere.

One feature that would make this really nice is if it could have something like Vercel preview environments, where I need to auth my fly account to view the URL. That'd solve the public URL without me needing to do my own auth thing in every app.

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losvedir 10 hours ago | parent [-]

How do you make these personal iOS apps? Do you have to release them to the App Store? What if you want a small handful of users (eg family members)? And does Android work similarly?

	▲	mcintyre1994 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		You can deploy from XCode to your iPhone, and it seems to behave like any other app when you do that. I do have a paid Apple developer account, and I think I read that if you don't then you have to re-sign the app every 7 days. If you wanted a small number of users then I don't think this would work. I think you could use TestFlight, which is Apple's method for distributing an unreleased version of an app, but I'm not sure what the review process would look like for that. Android would be much easier as long as you can still sideload APKs, you could just build the APK and send it to everyone to install. I read that there were some changes to sideloading APKs but I don't know the details. In terms of actually making the app, I don't know Swift or iOS at all so it's all generated. Usual caveats, and I'm only running them on my own phone. I ask Claude (not code) to help me with the spec, I give it some bullet points and it asks a bunch of clarifying questions then gives me a spec. I put that in a new directory, fire up Claude and use the ralph-loop plugin (https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/tree/main/plugins/...): > /ralph-loop:ralph-loop "Implement the iOS app described in app-spec.md. You have access to xcode CLI tools. You should write tests and use them to verify your work. The task will be complete when the app is fully implemented, with all tests passing. Output <promise>COMPLETE</promise> when finished." --max-iterations 50 --completion-promise "COMPLETE" Once it's done you can open the app in XCode, test it in a simulator, play with it and iterate a bit and then send it to your phone! Editing to add because I can't edit the original post: I think the limiting factor here might be the concurrent sprites limit. It seems like if you're on pay-as-you-go then you can only have 3 running concurrently, and have to subscribe to get 10.