Show HN: My First iOS App | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: My First iOS App

apps.apple.com

2 pointszacksiri4 comments

Honestly I didn't think it would be possible when I started, my background is Elixir / Phoenix / Backend engineering. But thx to Codex the app turned out to be something I'm quite proud of.

The app is designed to help you find movies to watch. Give you back control, instead of just taking what the algorithms give you, and you end up scrolling for 30 mins not picking anything just to end up on youtube or tiktok.

You can find movies based on your interest, ask it for top 10 lists on specific providers and so on...

Do let me know your thoughts. I've personally discovered many gems I never knew existed for example:

- Uncut Gems

- Awakenings

- Wake up Dead Man (Knive's Out)

- A Quiet Place I / II

- Blackberry

- Army of Thieves / Army of the Dead

- Infernal Affairs

- The Amateur

I hope it gives you as much joy as it has given me.

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Congrats on shipping! Looks quite polished. May be helpful to show how it differ from JustWatch or other streaming service aggregators.

Well with JustWatch and other service aggregators you cannot search for movies by themes / use natural language. For example:

- "Zombie or post apocalyptic movies released in the last 5 years"

- "Find me top 10 movies on [insert streaming provider]"

- "Can you find me top 10 movies released in the last 5 years I haven't seen"

- "Movies that will make me feel like I'm trapped in space"

- "Movies that put smart people under pressure"

You simply cannot do this with the streaming service aggregators or JustWatch.

> You simply cannot do this with the streaming service aggregators or JustWatch.

While that might be true, you can also just type "Movies that show smart people under pressure" [1] or similar queries directly into Google, and Gemini AI overview will give you a list of movies that match said criteria.

I assume you’re just passing the request on to an LLM. So unless the LLM is running on prem (like a tiny llama model), you’re probably sending it to OpenRouter or some other AI provider at cost which might explain the In-App purchases.

In all candor, I think it’s going to be an incredibly hard sell to convince people to pay for a recommendation app.

[1] - https://share.google/aimode/GiCcCHX5MpgN5o5V2

It's a lot more than an LLM, it's backed by database + LLM. Gemini / ChatGPT on it's own believe it or not has hallucinated movies and imdb links.

While google can show you results it cannot personalize things for you. With this app you can mark movies as seen and you can ask for "things i haven't seen"

or ask it to "pick a movie for me" from a search result, you can tell it which region / streaming service you have and search within things you can actually watch.

You can't do any of that with google.

There are tons of queries i've tried where google will simply not be able to give me good results.

The goal is to have a TvOS app where you can just search across all your streaming options and with a single click open / stream any movies you find. Instead of having to search 10 different streaming apps to something you want to watch.

In the example you provided I could not see any streaming options for any of the movies or figure out if it's available in my region. I would have to do multiple other search to figure out where I can watch them. I also cannot see ratings etc...

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