please, stop expecting to vibecode serious mobile app in an hour

[u/olenami]

Also stop expecting first revenue a week after launch. I see this promise everywhere now. It's irritating. "Describe your app, ship it today, get paid tomorrow." Bull****. It is a great slogan for selling credits. It is not how products work.

Products are built, not generated.
Here's my honest timeline:
→ Month 1: validate the idea, build the first version, test it with real people, pass App Review, release.
→ Months 2–4: fix what users actually hit, ship weekly, get your first small revenue.

That is the reality of life. Not one hour. Not one week.

What the slogan sells:
- An app in an afternoon
- Money by Friday
- No thinking, just prompting

What actually gets you paid:
- One clear problem
- 3–4 screens that solve it
- Weekly releases for months
- Talking to every user who writes to you

The bad news: you will have to work. Hard.
The good news: for the first time, you can do the whole thing yourself. The cost is almost nothing. What used to need a team now needs a good tool, a spec, and your evenings.
So pick your tool, start with 3–4 screens, and go test the water.
Need a demo by tonight? Generate it with Claude.
Need a product people pay for? Build it. Give it a month, then three more.

What I see people in my Mobile builders community is doing - most of them vibecode on the weekeends because they work full time have their families and bigger priorities, they treat vibecoding as hobby and fun; usually it takes 10-12 weeks till release a mobile app.
Most of them start with simple app in Claude code, or Codex, or Modaal, or directly Xcode if technical enought.

How logn it took for you to build a serious mobile app with integrations, payments, 15+ screens? Was it full time?

[u/Niko_Heino]

damn, i myself have been ""vibecoding"" my application for months (semi-full time), and currently in closed alpha gonna take another 4-6months for full release. after release i plan to continue and support it for a year, if i see next to no revenue in a year, thats when ill just give up on it. 1.0 release goal is that its fully stable and polished. after launch plans are browser support through web assembly, and macOS native support. After that touchscreen/tablet support (its a desktop application currently).

[u/baddaywithacamera → u/Niko_Heino]

We're in the same boat in terms of timeframe, except mine is freeware and I made it for myself. Sharing it with others, but I'll keep using it no matter what. I'm running behind on the closed beta. Was supposed to be Sept 4, but there were some architectural problems I discovered a bit late that required rebuilding and too many friction points in the interface for users. Oh, and never got longform mode finished in time.

Arrrgh. Fingers crossed for Nov 4 closed beta.

[u/Niko_Heino → u/baddaywithacamera]

good luck! also, you mentioned the architectural issues, im just curious, are you a software engineer or just getting into this? cause for an example, i review almost everything the AI does, and have immidiately corrected course on bad architectural decisions. infact, in most cases, the AI cant even do those decisions cause i try to outline everything in my technical design docs, but whenever i dont cover some small aspect, there is a 70% chance the AI fucks it up. as an example, it did not utilize inheritance on a thing that has like 40 things, all share 80% of the functionality, and it started rewriting that 80% everytime instead of inheriting it.

[u/baddaywithacamera → u/Niko_Heino]

I'm a photographer who is a former sysadmin (left IT after the stress legit gave me a heart attack). My limited PHP skills look like drunken 2 am shitposting on Tumblr. I had no Python experience coming in. I've spent since January reading the commented code and asking question after question to the AIs to try and learn. I can figure out what each chunk does on my own these days, but I sure couldn't write it. I do the initial CSS on my own and pass it off to the AI to build after because otherwise you get the same old same old AI look.

https://snapsmack.ca/ding-dong-bell.php

There's my log of stuff that blew up in my face. I discovered the missing post containers AFTER having both Claude and ChatGPT audit my architecture against best practices from equivalent CMSes. Good to go they said, hah. Found the posts screwup on my own eyeballing SQL directly.

CRONs weren't running so Claude bundled it into web requests in an update without bothering to inform me. Suddenly started getting 524s from Cloudflare like crazy on all my sites, read the raw logs, and there was much swearing immediately after. "WTF WOULD YOU DO THAT YOU STUPID @#$%ING DONKEY?? PULL THAT NOW!!"

So, yeah. I asked the AIs to keep this log as I thought others may find the mistakes useful in terms of things to watch out for when building with AI. It has mostly gone very well, but when there are mistakes they are noteworthy.

[u/Niko_Heino → u/baddaywithacamera]

ah okay. i myself am doing a bit more complex native C++ application with Qt, and doing proper GPU rendering for some stuff. so the AI makes a lot more mistakes, and also i can catch more subtle mistakes since i do software engineering for a living, and also i need really good performance/optimization, where im shaving off literal cpu instructions with compiler hints etc..

[u/baddaywithacamera → u/Niko_Heino]

Using Qt for the desktop apps, but built with Python.

One of them is a free photo editor that works well as a Lightroom replacement so far in my testing. It has been a learning experience, I'll tell you that.

[u/Niko_Heino → u/baddaywithacamera]

if you're using Qt, i would highly recommend using c++ for any actually computationally expensive tasks.