I Built an iOS App in 8 Minutes (No Code, No Developer)

Key Takeaways

I only collaborate with tools that I think will make a difference for the small business owner, the businesses or just founders or creators, people who want to make something or need to make something. And when Super App came to me, I just wasn't sure, but like all sponsors, I go test the application and if it passes that kind of requirement, I'll then put it here. Now, what you're going to see is an iOS building system that I just use one prompt and it builds it for [music] me. And you're actually probably seeing it on the screen right now, but what's important here is A, maybe you want to build an app and put it on the store and try to make money. But B, maybe you're business that just needs an internal application to do something. Let's take a prompt. We're going to build something here that is practical for this barber shop I was at recently. And then you'll hopefully get some ideas, see how easy it is and inspire you to think like what are different applications you can use in your office right now to maybe speed up a workflow, help with inventory, help with document intake, whatever you can imagine. Now you can build it, put it on your phone. All right, I hope you enjoy the video and I hope it inspires you to build something. >> [music] >> Thank you. All right, we're going to download the app, but we're going to have to set up Xcode. So this is going to be probably the second hardest part of all of this. So we're going to just download Xcode. This is what you need to build a project on iOS or the Mac. It's just what Apple it's their foundational application. It's big and it takes a while, so just give it time. We will set up a developer account later or how step you through some of the process, but it These are the two hardest parts and after this it's such a pleasure cuz again, I used to do this all by hand and by the time you're done setting these things up or getting everything to the store, it was it would just wear you out. All right, finally it's opened up. We're going to click open or start downloading. I'm going to add my password here for the Mac. And this will open in just a moment. I don't think we need to do anything more here. We can just go back to Super App. So let's just go do that. And it sees it's green, it's connected. We're going to click continue. And now the next step. Again, downloading huge files. These are gigabytes. I think one of these took 30 minutes to download. So yeah, just give it a go and let it run. When you come back, you'll have green buttons. We're ready to continue. You're almost there. Give it a moment and here we go. We're at the prompt and you're going to see something kick open in a moment, so don't get too shocked, but just give it a moment. That is your phone simulator. So now you're really ready to go here. These two things are kind of all you'll need for a little bit. I'll move the browser out of the way and then we'll do our prompt to get going and and build what we're building. All right, so we're going to build. Any of these AI prompting videos that I do, it's always hard because I'm going to do it in front of you and sometimes this stuff doesn't always just repeat itself perfectly. But let's see what happens. I'm going to go through the same process and build the same application. So all I'm going to do here is get my prompt. Now I want to show you a trick really quick that just talks about how do I get my prompt? I open up Claude and I just say, you know, I'm trying to do something here. I don't have it tell me or I don't want it to build a prompt for me that is technical. I want it to help build a prompt for this other system to build the application. So I'm going to ask it to help me build a prompt around my business idea, my user goals. So just talk with it. By the time you're done, it should give you a prompt you can hand to this other application. Take your time though, get a good prompt out of here and then we can put it into the the the Super App. Now what I did was I got this prompt and I explained it's going to be used in a barber shop. Each staff member will have it on their phone. There's no need to log into the app and I just go down the flow here. I gave it a thing it's going to do, which this is the technical part, but it would have walked me through this. I just had a vision to use Nano Banana for images. But it would have done it for me. I just want to get some quality out of the image system. We choose iPhone, but we could do other stuff here like iOS Mac. That's cool because I've been wanting to do some desktop apps. Design inspiration You already saw what I built. I'm just going to let it do it again. I didn't really have a design idea, but that's cool that it will let me do that. And the voice thing is nice if you want to do voice input, which is it's really handy as you start building more and more. Very rarely will I type all this stuff. And then we let it go. Um so I'll cut the video a bit here. So I'm just going to pause and let's see what happens. So it it's finished. I started at 11:28. It's 11:36 right now. So that took 8 minutes. Okay? I mean, last time I did this, I had to fidget with a few settings to make it do what I wanted. So we're not there yet, I don't think, but we'll find out. Okay? So I'm going to click library and I'm going to put a photo in here so that we can use that photo. Now if I click phone or camera, sorry, it will it will work on the phone, but you can't I wasn't able to simulate it here. So let's go back to here, choose from library. Now let me go put that image into the library. One moment. Oh, before I do that, I'm going to turn genius mode on and I'm going to tell it by the way the camera thing just happened, okay? I'm going to speak to it, so I'm just going to say, "Hey, the camera button made the app crash. Maybe it's just cuz I'm on the simulator. I know last time I did this, you made a fix to make it not crash and then I just started using the library on the simulator and then when I put it into TestFlight, the camera worked perfectly fine. Is there anything you can do here to make sure it doesn't crash?" All right, let's let that run in genius mode. Then while it's doing that, I'm going to go grab a test image I made and then we'll drop that into the library and we'll start using that to test this out. All right, let's jump back in. We have an image in the gallery. It said, "Okay, great. I'm going to go fix the camera issues." We're back. Genius mode, I'm going to keep that on for now cuz we're going to ask another thing in a moment. I'm going to launch the app again over here, so it should launch over here. Now sometimes I go back to the home screen. That helps there. So I'm going to click on photo and library cuz again I'm on my simulator and we're going to do that. Now I'm going to give it the picture I made, but the it's not connected to that endpoint I made. So let's see what happens. Now these question mark icons didn't happen the first time, but this is just working with the system a few times back and forth, you'll really get it going. And then the button's off screen here. So again, this didn't happen the first time. I gave it no I gave it no design hints, so I could have, but we're going to click that button there. We're going to quickly tell it to fix that button. So let's do that. All right, it's relaunching and oh wow, look at that. All right, it's testing itself. Um huh. Let's see what happens. We'll choose that face and then male and then mohawk and then okay, I would like to move it up more, but I'll go back and forth with that later. Now the generate again, now this is the next step, okay? This is great. Now when I click it, nothing happens, but I haven't given you the URL and I haven't given you the bearer token you need to talk to. Can I do that now? Again, if you were doing this, you could have just had it choose the API it is suggested for me or the service cuz we're going to use a back end AI service for this. Your application might be more simple and you don't need this. So let it walk you through, okay? See how far you can get with it walking you through it. Okay, so this is where things will take a moment for you. If your application needs to store data, it's going to connect to a a database. It's called Superbase, no relation to Super App, and it's going to set that up for you. Now, when I say it's going to set that up for you, this is probably the only technical part, I think. So I'm going to walk you through it. Okay, so let's go set up Superbase together. All right, let's do this. So basically I'm going to say yes. Now I already have a Superbase account, so this process will be easier for me, but I haven't set it up with this particular application with Super Super App. I'm going to go here. I'm going to sign into Superbase by clicking that. It's a great service. It has a free tier, so we can start at that level. And then I'm going to select the organization I want to use. Now if you don't have an org, if you haven't signed up yet, then you're going to take a moment to just sign up. You're going to sign start your project, use your email and and create a password and then just get going. Once you're signed up and you come back and log in, then we'll see this screen here when you connect to here and whatnot. So at this point, you only have one organization. I have a bunch. So I'm going to choose that org and then it's going to do the rest. So I'm going to say, "Go open up the the Super App app." Too many Supers. And then I'm going to pull that out of the way. Now because I have an org and many databases, which you will not, I have to choose. I'm going to choose the first one I see just to use that. All right, that is pretty much it, but that's probably the only technical thing that I think is going to be intimidating. So now it's going to say it's it's doing the right thing by saying, "Listen, I don't want you to paste your password in here. I want you to give it to me in a safe way." And that is just just great. So I'm going to go add my key to Superbase. So let's go do that. And because I'm multitasking, I didn't read the message. So secret store Nano Banana bearer token. So I'm going to go take that. It was already saved and I just had you add the API URL. So how do we do that, okay? We go back to that Superbase area, which it probably linked us to. We go to edge functions on the side and we go to secrets. And here we're going to take that key. That's what they call it. And then we're going to put our value here. So let me go get that value and put it there. And again, some of this is not that important because it would have walked you through it. I just kind of decided to do it a little differently. All right, so let's give it a go knowing I did it maybe out of order. And then if I if we have an issue, we'll go look. And let me pause for a moment. I'm going to go grab the API so I can look to see if it's coming in. All right, just keeping an eye on that and when she's him mail and then we'll do Mohawk cuz it's the easiest one to really see. We'll give it a go. The image the button did go to the API and watching it right now. That's cool. That means it did the URL the secret and it sent a payload that was hopefully right which again technical stuff. I wouldn't worry about it and then it returned results. So at this point I'm going to go ask it why don't I see the results. Okay, let me go ask that question. When you do this just go at the simple route possible. If you don't get the quality you want out of the output then try to push the technology. Take the easy path build measure learn and then see how far you get and just be clear with the AI give it screenshots tell it what you're having trouble with. We're in genius mode let's make that sure that's on and we'll do Mohawk again and you know I'll double check it's hitting the service I made there it goes. All right, finally. So let's do another one. Let's do buzz cut. So it's really that easy to get it to work. We've actually set up a database and everything with just a few clicks. That's really awesome. Now having it on my computer is a fraction of the battle. So let's not worry about that. Let's now get this and we could tighten up the UI but that's just going back and forth. I'm not going to worry about that. Let's get this to the Apple Store. That to me the super app makes that almost a joy but it is still tricky. So let's walk through it. Okay. All right, one moment. All right, so let's do the publishing. All right, so this is how we show it in the simulator but I want to publish this. I want to send it to the Apple Store. This used to be a nightmare. So you have to have an Apple developer account. So you can enroll in one here if you're not enrolled. I'm already enrolled. Now the problem is if you're enrolling now you have to pay a hundred bucks a year. I know. >> [snorts] >> But listen, if you're going to do this for a business and you have five apps or if you have employees or using your app it might be worth it still honestly. If you have a business idea then of course it's worth it. Just every year you're going to have to pay to be a developer and that's just how it goes with Apple. So this is nothing to do with super app at all. So I'm going to log into my account. Now when I did sign up and and renewed my membership it took about two hours to be usable. So just give it time. That's not a super app issue. >> [clears throat] >> Apple is a very tricky company to work with technically. So just just remember that. So if you're just signing up for the first time give yourself some time to for that all to happen. Okay. So I could generate with AI. I could upload a file. I uploaded a nice file but I'm going to generate this one with AI just because I don't want to overlap my other one. And this used to all be a lot of detail work to be honest with you and and I'm glad they're doing it. So here we are we've logged in now we're going to give the app info and we're going to click create app. All of this stuff takes time so just be patient. We're going to then say app created in the App Store which is cool. Now they're going to build it which again takes time as it builds your app. It basically does what it does to render it or compile it. Let's give it a moment. All right, so we it's still setting up things. Now it's gone over to TestFlight. TestFlight is basically how we can test applications before they get into the store and the nice part here is you can get a lot of time to test it on your phone and then you can invite other people to test it with you. So if you had an office full of staff then they could you know log into the TestFlight and use it as well on their iPhone. Let me log in one moment. So that button to open TestFlight sent me over to here. Okay. Now let's leave this alone for just a moment cuz I want to show something. So it's building still and again what's really nice here is the detail work. It's going to set up the TestFlight for me send me an invite to my email and so when I go get that email on my phone I can just use it just like that. Now I'm going to click continue and I don't want to submit it for review. Now if you're trying to make this a public app that anyone can use then that's great go for it. I need more some time to not only test it but this is a good example of an app I'm going to use in the store or this person's going to use it in their store. They're not going to publish the app and use it that way. So again TestFlight great for in-house usage. Okay. So now you know again we don't really need to be here but I could go into TestFlight and I could add internal users. Okay. So I can click here and add other people on my list. Once you do that you can start seeing how easy it could be to get people on boarded to your application and get testing it. And when it's funny cuz the word test it's also just using it. They're going to be able to use the app on their phone. So all right, I'm going to switch cameras here because this is my phone actually filming this and then we'll see me get the invite and then start using the app on my phone. All right, let's do that. All right, you're going to get an email like this and you're going to obviously click the button. Now if you don't have TestFlight installed all you have to do is go to the App Store and just install TestFlight. Just keep an eye out for things you type out what you want and sometimes the wrong thing shows up but here you have TestFlight by Apple. Now once that opens up we see our icon we made so we know it's the app we want and then we click install. Now anyone on your team could do this. You invite them to the team flight and they can use this or TestFlight sorry. So now here's the app. It's on my phone for real. I'm going to click the camera and then we'll get a warning saying do you allow this? I'm going to say yes and we'll take a quick photo. I'll choose Mohawk and generate and then in a moment again all relative to the speed of my API I made we're going to have a Mohawk and there we go. That is awesome. Think about it from the sense of your your store your job and what you could do. All right, and that's really it. You saw me build the app in in very little time. You saw it on my phone for real. You saw me TestFlighting it. I mean there were some intimidating parts the super base moment which eventually will get easier and then just the downloading Xcode and dealing with that and the developer [music] account for Apple but if you could get over those hurdles I guarantee you as a business owner as someone with an idea an entrepreneur you could get an app into the store and passing their approval process but more importantly just having your team in your office in your in your company use your app as a TestFlight as you saw an intranet like application. So I turned down a lot of sponsors. I'm glad I said yes to Super App because it really did work. I'm glad I tried it. I'm definitely going to be putting some TestFlight ideas out there maybe an app of my own eventually. [music] In the meantime please click the link please give it a try ask any questions below or find me in my different places to get help to use apps like this and get started. All right, and thanks for watching. I hope this inspired you to start building something. Thank you.