Show HN: Spawn – Build iOS Apps with English | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Spawn – Build iOS Apps with English

spawnapp.com

41 pointsgsundeep24 comments

Hi HN,

Spawn lets you build apps with human language. You can include images, audio and other files in your app just by dragging and dropping.

Here's a demo video where I build the game of Snake in 60 seconds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIqp7cvmE_M

As it’s still in alpha, you may need to regenerate a few times to get the app functioning the way you want. So far I’ve found it’s pretty good at generating simple utilities and games. Over time, as both Spawn and the underlying models improve, it will be able to build more complex software.

I have a bunch of ideas for future updates, for example:

- Allow users to include wireframes that Spawn will follow as it generates their app.

- Android support in Mac, Windows & Linux Spawn desktop app. This way, people can use Spawn to build for both mobile platforms using the same app specifications. Imagine someone living in rural India using their Chromebook to build apps for their Android phone, without needing to learn how to code.

- Enable people to build apps that have accounts and backend logic by autogenerating and deploying a backend during app generation.

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

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I'm interested to see how this goes.

I recently used ChatGPT and Claude to help myself build a simple app for my wife. Just listing things and being able to edit them basically. It was VERY frustrating as both models get pretty basic things wrong around the plumbing stuff like configuring SwiftData or CoreData.

I tried it with a version of the prompt(s) I used in that project and I got an app that's just a white page.

Thanks for giving it a try! I just took a look at your prompt and it looks well defined. I'll investigate the generated code and reply back here.

I made some slight modifications to your prompt and got something working:

Here's the prompt: https://i.imgur.com/lUjLTsd.png Plain text: https://pastebin.com/HTUjcy7M

The two differences from your prompt are I changed "A listing of horses" to "A listing of horses that the user has added" and at the end I added "Use NSUserDefault for data persistence, not coredata". I'm modifying the model prompt as something like that should definitely not be needed in the app specifications.

Some screenshots of the generated app: https://i.imgur.com/IwEKuZW.png https://i.imgur.com/zONc9Fm.png

I just realized that I don't have XCode installed, and I'm hesitant to due to storage etc.

Would something like the following be feasible even though accelerometer isn't listed as one of the native capabilities?

``` Build an app that uses the accelerometer to measure the g-forces experienced while driving, and uses an audio tone with varying volume to indicate the magnitude of g-forces.

Show a large circle on the screen with a single black dot to represent the current g-forces for X and Y. Show a vertical rectangle on the side with a single blue dot to represent the current g-forces in the Z direction.

Using a single audio tone, vary the volume of this tone to represent the sum of X, Y, and Z g-force readings. At standstill the audio should be silent. ```

I have wanted something like this for a long time for driving to get a better sense of whatever cargo or passengers might be experiencing.

Spawn apps can use the accelerometer - thanks for pointing this out, I'll clarify the website.

I pasted your prompt and got this: https://imgur.com/a/3Wg8AuK

During the recording, I moved around around and stopped twice. The only thing not working is the audio volume changing based on the g-force readings. I'm digging into why that's not working.

That's fantastic, wow!

> Over time, as both Spawn and the underlying models improve, it will be able to build more complex software.[^Citation needed]

It seems to me that with the transformer model world we now live in, utilities like these are excellent at generating things that appear in many tutorials/posts/etc. However, there's little-to-no evidence that they are able to generate anything truly custom. For instance, any application requiring any significant level of domain-specific knowledge (your last point), and given the model's architectures there's no reason to believe that will occur. What is it that makes you so confident that will become a possibility?

That's a fair point, I can't say for certain that tools like Spawn will be able to build really complex software. However, I think there's a ton of software that could be built with current model capabilities that simply isn't getting built because the remainder of the process still has a high learning curve (ex: learning how to use Xcode, figuring out app permissions etc.)

I'm confused why some people seem to believe that coding is the most difficult part of developing an App

While distribution is the biggest thing, yes the number of well functioning apps is limited. Plenty ones in appstore that only half work.

I’d love to have something like this in Xcode. Or alternatively if I could export an xcodeproj file from my Spawn project? I couldn’t imagine developing an entire launchable app in English (at least not yet). But if it could build an MVP that I can then iterate on, that would be awesome!

I totally agree! When you export your app in Spawn, it’s exported as an Xcode project and you can make code modifications from there

Oh nice! Will try this out next time I want to spawn a new xcode project.

Always interesting to see new takes on natural-language-to-code projects. Let me know when I can build Android apps!

Early days but this is what I believe the future of 'product development' looks like.

Getting "Generation Error!" whenever I try to generate an app.

Sorry about that - can you try one more time? I just added some additional logging

I am curious is it done in UIKit or SwiftUI?

Can this create Apple-watch-specific apps?

Not yet, but that sounds like a great idea as watch apps are often a lot simpler than iOS ones. I’ll put that on the roadmap - thanks!

What model are you using under the hood?

I'd honestly settle for building iOS apps with Windows.

It's the fact that iOS use iOS-specific APIs when generating projects using XCode.

I'm using Big Sur so can't test this one, but still keepiing an eye on it. Some social media account as X to keep us updated too.

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