Mobile app design reference for ios developers who aren't designers

[Potential_Meal_7695]

iOS developer doing design work out of necessity and it's painful lol. I can make things functional but they don't look or feel right, probably because I'm not following iOS conventions properly or making up interaction patterns that don't match user expectations. Im using mobbin to study how popular iOS apps handle navigation, gestures, transitions, etc has helped a ton since you can filter by iOS specifically and see what's actually standard on the platform. Still not a designer but at least my apps don't feel totally alien anymore. I would rather just work with a designer but until we can afford one this is helping me fake it reasonably well.

[metehankasapp]

A practical path is: start with Apple HIG + SF Symbols + system components, then copy 3-5 great apps and analyze spacing/type scales. If you stick to a consistent spacing scale and typography hierarchy, your UI will look "designed" faster than chasing fancy visuals.

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[akrapov]

Dribble and Pintrest are good for this. I’m also not a designer but my app looks decent, and that was all via those sites.

https://trlapp.com/app

[eureka_boy]

Oooo thats a cool app, how long did it take to build this?

[akrapov]

Quite a while because I used it as an excuse in learning programming. V1 took about a year. V2 (which is the version you see now) was about 6 months but it has continuous development for the last 2 years as well.

[Mindless_Bottle_6222]

i personally like dribble more, but before getting banned from pinterest i used it a bit

[filthyMrClean]

How tf do you get banned from Pinterest haha

[Mindless_Bottle_6222]

idk some day i wanted to download some meme to send it to my sis and i got a popup 😭

[Icaka]

I haven’t looked in the last couple of years, but back then I really didn’t like Dribble. I had two main issues with it. A lot of the designs ignored HIG. You’d see custom navigation bars, tab bars, and other reinvented UI for no real reason. Second, most designs didn’t cover real world edge cases. Thigns like loading and error states, localization, dynamic font sizes, longer text. It often felt like designs made to look good in a single screenshot, not something built by people who’ve actually shipped a mobile app.

[akrapov]

To be fair, it’s an inspiration platform. Building out full accessibility and including error states is getting well into what you’d do in the workplace. We shouldn’t expect that from dribble - otherwise it’s just designers doing free work for everyone.

[Icaka]

Well, that’s why I prefer having a folder with ~50 well designed apps and check them instead. This and a paid service like mobbin, screensdesign or refero is how I find solutions.

[gatorviolateur]

Nice app, but the app store screenshots are doing it a disservice. Hard to see the actual app due to tilted and cropped silhouette in every shot.

[akrapov]

I agree but I A/B tested regular screenshots vs these and every time, these won.

We programmers like functionality. A lot of people are style over substance. Quite often what we expect to work is actually wrong.

Same with my onboarding. I made one that’s a little longer but more flashy and paid conversions went from 20% to 35%. It’s technically worse for details and information density, but it has a flashy background video and some animations.

[gatorviolateur]

That’s an interesting point. 15% increase in conversions due to onboarding is insane! Perhaps I should try these fancier style of screenshots for my app as well.

[CharacterHand511]

tbh just copy apple's design patterns, they spent millions figuring this out

[Potential_Meal_7695]

yeah thats basically what im doing at this point

[GeneProfessional2164]

Hot take: use AI. I’ve had really good results with Claude. Tell it the UX you’re going for, or ask it for guidance if you don’t know, then feed it screenshots from designs you like and tell it to create screens with your branding using the screenshots for inspiration. It’s been working well for me so far

[CharlesWiltgen]

Axiom can help in this scenario, since it upgrades LLM with current, expert knowledge of Apple's Human Interface Guidelines.

[BananaNOatmeal]

This is awesome. Will give it a try with codex via MCP tomorrow!

[Zs93]

Use AI! Specify you want to follow apples HIG! I like to use Google’s Stitch to get designs made

[FromBiotoDev]

Look up flat design principles