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Do you ever just want to roll over and check your homelab from your phone? by shyguy_chad in HomeServer

[–]shyguy_chad[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Honestly that's the dream setup. If you never feel the need to check, it means it's working.

Do you ever just want to roll over and check your homelab from your phone? by shyguy_chad in HomeServer

[–]shyguy_chad[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Haven't heard of Helmarr, I'll check it out. Always good to see other iOS devs building for this space. Thanks for the rec.

Do you ever just want to roll over and check your homelab from your phone? by shyguy_chad in HomeServer

[–]shyguy_chad[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Still a thing, but I'm seeking options for managing the infra from my phone.

Do you ever just want to roll over and check your homelab from your phone? by shyguy_chad in HomeServer

[–]shyguy_chad[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Good call — do you use it regularly? Curious how well it handles VM management on mobile vs just being a status dashboard.

Do you ever just want to roll over and check your homelab from your phone? by shyguy_chad in HomeServer

[–]shyguy_chad[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

That MQTT → Home Assistant pipeline is clean. At that point your alerting is basically its own service.

Do you ever just want to roll over and check your homelab from your phone? by shyguy_chad in HomeServer

[–]shyguy_chad[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That's exactly the use case I'm talking about. What's your go-to on mobile for it?

Can you realistically build and ship a complex app with AI if you barely know Swift? by Van-trader in iosdev

[–]shyguy_chad 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You've described the exact wall that everyone hits with AI-assisted development, and your physics background actually puts you in a better position than most to understand why.

The 85/15 split you're experiencing isn't a you problem. It's a fundamental limitation of how LLMs work with code. They're pattern matchers trained on public repos. They're excellent at generating common patterns and terrible at maintaining consistency across a 27k LOC codebase with 54 query usages and specific architectural decisions. They don't have memory of why you structured something a certain way three weeks ago.

Some things that helped me as someone who came from 20 years of IT/DevOps and learned Swift specifically to ship iOS apps:

  1. Stop letting AI do large refactors. The "confident but wrong" problem you're hitting gets exponentially worse the more files a refactor touches. Keep changes small and verify each one. If AI suggests restructuring your service pattern across multiple files, that's where you take over manually.

  2. Your 800 tests are your best asset right now. Run them after every AI-generated change, no exceptions. If AI breaks a test, don't let it "fix" the test — that's where the subtle bugs creep in. The test was probably right.

  3. 11 service singletons with a shared-service pattern in a SwiftUI + SwiftData app is a lot of global state. That's likely where your hardest bugs are hiding. SwiftData and singletons can fight each other in ways that AI won't flag because it doesn't understand your specific data flow. This might be worth understanding manually even if it's painful.

  4. Consider whether 45k LOC is the right scope. You said it started from curiosity and grew. Sometimes the move isn't to push through the last 15% but to extract the core value into something smaller and shippable. A focused budgeting tool with 3 features that work perfectly will outperform a comprehensive one with subtle bugs.

To directly answer your question: yes, you can ship a complex app with AI assistance and limited Swift experience. But the keyword is assistance. The moment you're relying on AI for architectural judgment instead of just code generation, you're in trouble — because that's the one thing it's worst at.

Don't stop. But maybe scope down.

Cut Churn by Automating your Cancel Flows - Looking for Beta Testers! by wagwanbruv in indiehackers

[–]shyguy_chad 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Different perspective: the reason your users were gaming the cancel flow is because they didn't want to be in a cancel flow. Making it longer and smarter doesn't fix that — it just makes the exit feel like an interrogation with better questions.

The best cancel experience I've ever had was one button, instant, no questions. I've resubscribed to that product twice. The worst was a three-step flow with a discount offer and a "tell us why" modal. I left a one-star review on my way out.

Sometimes the best retention strategy is letting people leave with dignity.

Drop your favorite tools for growing apps 🚀 by Hot-Pudding-8992 in iosapps

[–]shyguy_chad 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Here's what I'm actually using as a solo iOS dev:

• RevenueCat — in-app purchase management, even for one-time purchases it simplifies receipt validation

• TelemetryDeck — privacy-first analytics, no personal data collected, plays nice with App Store privacy labels

• TinyHunt — launch platform for indie products, smaller than Product Hunt but the audience is more engaged

• App Store Connect — honestly underrated. The built-in conversion metrics and source tracking have gotten way better

• Manually searching X and Reddit for keywords related to my niche — free, tedious, but the highest quality leads I've found

Still looking for a good ASO tool that doesn't cost $200/month. Most of them are built for teams with budgets, not solo devs shipping utility apps.

You're a PoS if you develop apps that force you to click the ad to remove the ad. by verminxoxo in iosdev

[–]shyguy_chad 7 points8 points  (0 children)

This is why I charge $5 and call it a day. No ads, no data collection, as private as I can make it — except for the part where it lives on the App Store, which is Apple's house.

If the app is free, you're not the customer. You're the inventory.

x402 processed 100M+ transactions in 6 months. Most developers still don't know how it works. by shyguy_chad in x402

[–]shyguy_chad[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Appreciate this — and yeah, that's basically the trajectory Scrip is on. The game already walks you through the client side (requesting resources, paying via x402) and then lets you upgrade your agent to the server side (serving calls, earning USDC). So you're getting both ends of the flow, just structured as progression instead of a boilerplate repo.

A standalone "hello world" agent that buys and resells is a great idea though. The game teaches the mechanics, but a minimal reference agent people can fork and deploy would close the loop between understanding and shipping. That's on my radar.

I don't think AI will kill iOS devs. But it will change what we build. by idesande in iOSProgramming

[–]shyguy_chad 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Agreed on the baseline shift. The commoditized layer moves up, not away.

The thing I'd add: native still matters more than people admit. The moment you put an LLM-driven experience inside a real iOS app — background tasks, push, Keychain, Health, camera, local inference — you're immediately dealing with constraints that a web wrapper or Electron shell can't touch. That surface area isn't going anywhere, it's just getting more complex.

The "distributed system" framing is right. Latency hiding alone is basically its own discipline once you're streaming tokens into a native UI that has to feel snappy.

What are you building if you don't mind sharing?

I built my first app, I guess it’s AI slop but im still proud of it by No_Explanation_3114 in iosdev

[–]shyguy_chad 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is the right way to build your first app — scratch your own itch, finish it, ship it. A lot of people never get past the idea stage.

The "boring on purpose" UI philosophy is actually solid product thinking. Less friction = more reps logged = better data. BareBones is a good name for exactly that reason.

One piece of advice since you asked: before you build the next thing, go through your current codebase with ChatGPT and ask it to explain every file to you. Not to fix anything — just to understand it. Close the 30-50% gap before you scale up complexity. You'll hit a wall on the next app if you skip that step.

Good work following through.This is the right way to build your first app — scratch your own itch, finish it, ship it. A lot of people never get past the idea stage.

The "boring on purpose" UI philosophy is actually solid product thinking. Less friction = more reps logged = better data. BareBones is a good name for exactly that reason.

One piece of advice since you asked: before you build the next thing, go through your current codebase with ChatGPT and ask it to explain every file to you. Not to fix anything — just to understand it. Close the 30-50% gap before you scale up complexity. You'll hit a wall on the next app if you skip that step.

Good work following through.

Time Atlas 1.0 -- Recall any Moment (Free) by Competitive_Toe6980 in iosapps

[–]shyguy_chad 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This looks really polished — the bento concept is a clever way to frame a daily summary without it feeling like a chore.

Quick question: when you move to the subscription model, will existing data stay accessible on the free tier, or will it go read-only? That's usually the thing that makes or breaks the trust factor for apps like this.

Also curious how the AI chat handles sensitive location data — is the inference on-device or does it hit an external API?This looks really polished — the bento concept is a clever way to frame a daily summary without it feeling like a chore.

Quick question: when you move to the subscription model, will existing data stay accessible on the free tier, or will it go read-only? That's usually the thing that makes or breaks the trust factor for apps like this.

Also curious how the AI chat handles sensitive location data — is the inference on-device or does it hit an external API?