You do not need to upload to TestFlight or the App Store; you can just install the app locally to your iPhone via usb -- even from Linux!
When in doubt, just ask your coding agent of choice to help you create and upload a Hello World iOS app. It's really easy.
sdicker 34 minutes ago [-]
I’ve been doing the same except that my linux installation is via WSL on Windows. I’ve been using sideloadly to move my IPA over to my phone. Works great.
GaryBluto 32 minutes ago [-]
Does the iPhone need to remain tethered if it is transferred via USB?
drakythe 21 minutes ago [-]
Dev apps need to be re-loaded every week (or two?) last time I did sideloading. The idea behind a dev app, in Apple's mind, is that it is for limited testing, so they have an expiration when not signed/installed through the App store.
Tiberium 3 hours ago [-]
It's kind of funny to be reading this:
> I had Claude Code create mine: I told Claude, more or less: I want to archive, Developer ID-sign, notarize, staple, and install this app to /Applications without ever opening Xcode. Write me a script that does the whole chain and fails loudly if any step breaks.
Even though the text we're reading is Claude talking to us as well :)
Also it was weird to see the mention of "ask your LLM" at almost every stage in the blog post:
> point Claude Code or your LLM coding tool of choice to this blog post, and let it figure it out
> When in doubt, ask your LLM of choice about them and have it help you get set up. It’s the one that’s going to be using Xcode for you anyway.
> The whole point of using the LLM in the first place is to avoid doing things manually that you don’t want to do.
> Again, if in doubt, ask Claude Code or your LLM of choice to create this for you.
> Again, this is why you talk to your LLM, tell it what you want, and have it help build your workflow.
ryandrake 2 hours ago [-]
Claude telling us to point Claude to a web site written by Claude so that we can use Claude to create a build environment...
ericol 2 hours ago [-]
yo dawg
natpalmer1776 1 hours ago [-]
I heard you liked Claude, so I put extra Claude in your Claude so you can do more Claude.
carimura 10 minutes ago [-]
"Claude was the only LLM to survive the LLM Wars."
theParadox42 1 hours ago [-]
… that Claude can use, because Claude can’t use the XCode gui very efficiently.
CharlesW 3 hours ago [-]
If it's okay to mention my own complementary open source project, Axiom¹ does a good job of helping coding harnesses know how to do this effectively for Apple OS development.
In addition to a deep roster of skills and agencts, Axiom includes several for-LLM tools². xclog, xcprof, xcsym, and xcui are designed to be used by LLMs, and expose capabilities in a token-efficient way. These tools are equally helpful for non-Axiom skills/agents.
Interesting this is coming across as novel. This is how CI build machines for Apple’s platforms have been setup in perpetuity.
hyzyla 1 hours ago [-]
Check also Sweetpad CLI. It’s basically wrapper around xcodebuild, but humans and agents. It’s my next project after Sweetpad VSCode extension for developing iOS/Swift applications in VSCode. Cli is still in beta, but I see on my own project that it’s already quite pleasant to use
In my experience, the better long-term choice if you're going to vibe code an app is to use Expo.
Its basis is React, so the code output quality is much higher than Swift because there is much more React code in LLM training data.
Everything is in the command line, and debugging is a breeze because it's a web view. But once it's compiled to native iOS, it feels like any other native app.
Expo + Fastlane = fully automated iOS submission and deployment. I issue one command and see a new version in the App Store.
hetspookjee 33 minutes ago [-]
Some parts when creating a new app cannot be automated right? Eg registering the app itself for example.
pzo 33 minutes ago [-]
You can as well make it simpler and use those skills:
both callstack and swmansion are mostly react native shops but those should work even in native ios/android as well
isodev 31 minutes ago [-]
In addition to the challenged Xcode, just using Swift seems to require a lot more tokens for both coding and dealing with build/platform quirks. Probably not super significant on indie scale but for anything more robust, it builds up quickly.
React Native and Flutter seem to be much more predictable for the bots (and more fun for humans, since they have actual hot reload).
coverband 41 minutes ago [-]
Regardless of the vibe coding aspect, there's good information here for anyone new to the mac/ios build/distribution workflows.
mulmboy 56 minutes ago [-]
I went to build an open source app from GitHub and was pretty surprised that it requires Xcode and that Xcode can't really be installed without an apple id. I do not want to make one and I certainly will not sign my computer into one.
I did end up somehow installing Xcode via some shady download and was on my way. But the whole ordeal left a very sour taste.
swiftcoder 25 minutes ago [-]
Running a Mac without an Apple ID feels like an exercise in masochism. I wasn’t aware one could even still it through first run without
everfrustrated 23 minutes ago [-]
Heck you can't even compile against many of the Mac APIs without a cert unlocked by a paid developer account.
sneak 41 minutes ago [-]
Though the primary way of installing Xcode is via MAS (requiring Apple ID login), Xcode can be downloaded from the Apple Developer website without an ADP membership, though you do have to log in to the website with an Apple ID. You don’t have to log into the Mac with an Apple ID though, you can then install and use it on a Mac without an Apple ID (though you will need one inside Xcode to sign apps to get them to run on an iOS device).
schainks 3 hours ago [-]
I just set up my pipeline to do this exact thing for both the Apple and Android ecosystems, dispatching loads to my mac studio or Linux box accordingly. I moved the runners off GitHub because uptime for GitHub actions has been trash lately, and the Apple Silicon runners are pricey.
Claude was great at figuring out what was broken when and either fixing it, or clicking as far as it could until it needed me.
You could say I'm mostly just IRL hands for the AI now.
Schiendelman 3 hours ago [-]
I've been using essentially this process (with Claude Code) for about six months. There are a couple of places where I've opened xcode; mostly to update the simulators for new betas of xcode 27, and once to add a target for Apple Watch (and I think something for HealthKit).
Interestingly, since about Opus 4.6, Claude has been able to reason its way into this process on its own. It was clunky until 4.7, and in 4.8 it's managed to find its way around every reason I had to open xcode myself.
saagarjha 2 hours ago [-]
Making your app buildable from the CLI is not something I do personally to use on my Mac but it is very useful when you're automating your CI. If you have GitHub Actions set up to build your app, so can Claude, assuming you have the right signing setup on your machine.
datadrivenangel 1 hours ago [-]
I've built a few small MacOS dock widgets now by just telling Claude/OpenCode to build them. Works well enough if you're very explicit.
The most useful one is a little weather sparkline to show local temperature forecasts. Useful every day.
recsv-heredoc 3 hours ago [-]
Having to have Xcode installed is more than half the problem. It makes Visual Studio look lightweight.
ryandrake 2 hours ago [-]
Xcode does have (or had, haven't checked for a while) a lightweight "command line tools only" installer. Unfortunately, that installer omits a lot of the actual useful command line tools, like the notary and stapler tools. I also recall that the command line tool only installer leaves out things like the metal compiler, too. Not sure what the point of it is.
dylan604 2 hours ago [-]
> Not sure what the point of it is.
My only familiarity with it is because it's needed by brew. I honestly never looked into exactly what is in the package, but I assumed things like what is installed with -devel packages of yum/apt-get/dnf/etc. Lots of repos have common list of things to install like gcc/make/etc. Again, just guessing, but it's one of the first things I've always run on a new Mac to get it usable for CLI usage.
saagarjha 2 hours ago [-]
It lets you build basic UNIX-like tools.
gumby 2 hours ago [-]
It’s mostly all the emulators and platform APIs.
I’m not defending Xcode (I hate it), just clarifying.
pupppet 2 hours ago [-]
Doesn't that mean you need to distribute the app (TestFlight) before you can preview your app? How do you test locally without the simulators?
simonw 2 hours ago [-]
For a macOS app you don't need a simulator. For an iPhone app I've seen Claude Code launch the simulator without me needing to open Xcode.
nwienert 1 hours ago [-]
I built an iOS simulator simulator, though only for RN. Runs in browser but covers 100% of the API of RN, iOS UI, and the top 1k native libraries basically now. Been an ongoing agentic experiment of mine that's about ready to release.
Kind of fun, you can develop iOS and Android both without a build step and without a Mac even.
turtlebits 1 hours ago [-]
Testing != Distribution. You can run directly on a connected iOS device, without setting up anything related to the app store.
josefrichter 1 hours ago [-]
Wait, I am not aware that I've done ANY of those setup steps, yet I'm building iOS and macOS apps without XCode. Both Claude and Codex handle it just fine and didn't ask me for any setup steps.
tdhz77 1 hours ago [-]
I do something similar in GitHub actions. Every new app is setup in a few minutes to star getting rejected by iOS and Android.
stephenhuey 2 hours ago [-]
Thought this was going to be about the new Ruby Native!
“From bundle install to your phone in minutes. To the App Store and Google Play without a line of native code.“
zuzululu 2 hours ago [-]
holy hell $299/app is wild
incanus77 2 hours ago [-]
One time?! That's amazing.
stephenhuey 1 hours ago [-]
Per year, but still amazing. I'd like to think of myself who knows what he is doing, but I just launched a Rails-based platform for a client on web, iOS and Android, and had to spend an annoying amount of time in Google Play and App Store Connect. $299 would be a tiny fraction of the billable hours I'd have to spend messing around in there, and that's not counting mobile app dev time at all, so I'm on the lookout for a good candidate project to try Ruby Native on!
chrisweekly 1 hours ago [-]
per app per year
mrbombastic 3 hours ago [-]
This is cool but also makes me worried about the tendency with llms for all of us to make bespoke solutions rather than building a better community tool or extending an existing tool to solve the problem. fastlane exists to solve exactly this problem in the mobile space.
ryandrake 2 hours ago [-]
Also, shell scripts as part of a build are usually a little worrying. I'd at least want the build steps to be all integrated into my Makefile or CMakeLists.txt
doug_durham 2 hours ago [-]
The llm is the better community tool. The important change is that you don't have to settle with someone developing a monolithic tool that happens to do what you need it to do. That was the way things used to need to be done because of the cost.
vl 2 hours ago [-]
Bespoke solutions are better in many cases. They do exact things required for the project without taking extra dependency. Reducing dependencies is beneficial, because dependencies require management. So with llms economy of taking dependency shifted.
Oh god, the app store does not need more slop. If you can't be bothered to open XCode (which I agree is a dumpster fire, but), you shouldn't be bothered to submit an app that a person has to review and another person has to filter out of their search results.
hyperhello 2 hours ago [-]
Being outside of the approved development loop has rough edges. How do you keep the app from putting up that permission to access documents folder all the time while you rebuild it?
saagarjha 2 hours ago [-]
They're a paid developer, so they are probably signing the app with a stable identity that avoids this.
exographicskip 1 hours ago [-]
Skimmed the article. Pretty close to my workflow using fastlane with tauri.
Useful sanity check!
murlax 48 minutes ago [-]
Tangentially, I despise Xcode and love the Expo ecosystem and all the lovely tooling that they have built. It is React Native but Expo honestly makes it so trivial to build stuff from the CLI without ever needing to open that abomination of an app. And with AI, I have built a lot of side project apps onto my iPhone, like a homelab app for monitoring my cameras with push notifications whenever someone is at the door, starting my irrigation and a whole lot more. Plus Tailscale of course. Kind of a crazy world that we live in now.
sefrost 45 minutes ago [-]
Yes, I remember React Native being quite painful before Expo!
Upgrading from one version to the next especially so.
Expo seems to shield you from a lot of issues, without really taking any power away from you either.
sgt 3 hours ago [-]
Although this has been well known for years and documented.
dylan604 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah, but not only was this "on a computer" but "with an AI" so it's not the same at all. /s
LatencyKills 3 hours ago [-]
I spent seven years as a dev on the Xcode team and this is pretty much my exact workflow these days.
sneak 44 minutes ago [-]
You still have to open Xcode (to get the certs), and you still have to accept the Xcode EULA. Title is quite misleading if not outright false.
onesandofgrain 37 minutes ago [-]
Don't make apps for iOS. The apple ecosystem is horrendous
rvz 2 hours ago [-]
By using "Claude Code"*
* and giving Anthropic all your secrets, env vars, certificates and your source code to them.
datadrivenangel 59 minutes ago [-]
I've used opencode on a plane with local models to make small updates to local MacOS apps. It's not fast or amazing, but it does work well enough to do trivial changes.
But also yes this is a real concern.
simonw 2 hours ago [-]
What bad things to you anticipate Anthropic doing with your secrets, env vars, and certificates?
You can even run simulators in it if you choose the Tart backend.
thoughtl3ss 1 hours ago [-]
And how is your vibe coded sandbox better than 1000 other sandboxes?
Danox 1 hours ago [-]
What could go wrong? Might Apple change something across five ecosystems and leave you in the lurch, and now you have to go through all the slop to try to fix it?
prakashrj 16 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
Rendered at 21:42:31 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Surprisingly, it's very easy. This works like a charm: https://github.com/xtool-org/xtool
You do not need to upload to TestFlight or the App Store; you can just install the app locally to your iPhone via usb -- even from Linux!
When in doubt, just ask your coding agent of choice to help you create and upload a Hello World iOS app. It's really easy.
> I had Claude Code create mine: I told Claude, more or less: I want to archive, Developer ID-sign, notarize, staple, and install this app to /Applications without ever opening Xcode. Write me a script that does the whole chain and fails loudly if any step breaks.
Even though the text we're reading is Claude talking to us as well :)
Also it was weird to see the mention of "ask your LLM" at almost every stage in the blog post:
> point Claude Code or your LLM coding tool of choice to this blog post, and let it figure it out
> When in doubt, ask your LLM of choice about them and have it help you get set up. It’s the one that’s going to be using Xcode for you anyway.
> The whole point of using the LLM in the first place is to avoid doing things manually that you don’t want to do.
> Again, if in doubt, ask Claude Code or your LLM of choice to create this for you.
> Again, this is why you talk to your LLM, tell it what you want, and have it help build your workflow.
In addition to a deep roster of skills and agencts, Axiom includes several for-LLM tools². xclog, xcprof, xcsym, and xcui are designed to be used by LLMs, and expose capabilities in a token-efficient way. These tools are equally helpful for non-Axiom skills/agents.
¹ Axiom: https://charleswiltgen.github.io/Axiom/ ² Axiom CLI tools: https://charleswiltgen.github.io/Axiom/tools/
1. https://sweetpad.hyzyla.dev/
2. https://github.com/sweetpad-dev/sweetpad
Its basis is React, so the code output quality is much higher than Swift because there is much more React code in LLM training data.
Everything is in the command line, and debugging is a breeze because it's a web view. But once it's compiled to native iOS, it feels like any other native app.
Expo + Fastlane = fully automated iOS submission and deployment. I issue one command and see a new version in the App Store.
https://github.com/software-mansion/argent
or
https://github.com/callstack/agent-device
both callstack and swmansion are mostly react native shops but those should work even in native ios/android as well
React Native and Flutter seem to be much more predictable for the bots (and more fun for humans, since they have actual hot reload).
I did end up somehow installing Xcode via some shady download and was on my way. But the whole ordeal left a very sour taste.
Claude was great at figuring out what was broken when and either fixing it, or clicking as far as it could until it needed me.
You could say I'm mostly just IRL hands for the AI now.
Interestingly, since about Opus 4.6, Claude has been able to reason its way into this process on its own. It was clunky until 4.7, and in 4.8 it's managed to find its way around every reason I had to open xcode myself.
The most useful one is a little weather sparkline to show local temperature forecasts. Useful every day.
My only familiarity with it is because it's needed by brew. I honestly never looked into exactly what is in the package, but I assumed things like what is installed with -devel packages of yum/apt-get/dnf/etc. Lots of repos have common list of things to install like gcc/make/etc. Again, just guessing, but it's one of the first things I've always run on a new Mac to get it usable for CLI usage.
I’m not defending Xcode (I hate it), just clarifying.
Kind of fun, you can develop iOS and Android both without a build step and without a Mac even.
https://rubynative.com
“From bundle install to your phone in minutes. To the App Store and Google Play without a line of native code.“
Useful sanity check!
Upgrading from one version to the next especially so.
Expo seems to shield you from a lot of issues, without really taking any power away from you either.
* and giving Anthropic all your secrets, env vars, certificates and your source code to them.
But also yes this is a real concern.
You can even run simulators in it if you choose the Tart backend.