[gitpusher]

Man. I looked at their landing page. Skimmed the "how we did it" article. And I still have no idea what this app does – seems like chat of some sort?

Edit: Ah. If you go to the iOS Store, they reveal that it is an AI app. How mysterious. Why not just say that on your landing page

[jama211]

Yeah I can’t find a reason why but I’m put off and uneasy reading all this for some reason . Also the detail in this “how we built the app” article is basically… too detailed? Like a new developer who comments every line of logic in their code. Perhaps it was also generated with AI with a prompt that was looking at the codebase?

I wish them all the best but perhaps this just isn’t for me.

[MaxLeiter]

A lot of react native apps do not feel native. Even more are just low quality. Many v0 users were asking us how exactly we did X or Y to make it feel so good, which is what this post is for.

[tennex]

I like it. This post is the perfect level of detail for people obsessed about UX minutiae.

Personally, I'm not a huge Vercel fan (IMO: lots of hype, business model encourages developer ecosystem lock-in), but this post gave me more trust in the design/UX care that goes into their products (which is a core Vercel strength).

[MaxLeiter]

I am obviously bias as a Vercel employee, but I think we actually do a lot to avoid locking our users in. You can read more about our approach here: https://vercel.com/blog/vercel-the-anti-vendor-lock-in-cloud

If that doesn't alleviate your concerns or you disagree, I'd love to hear your thoughts about how we can improve

[tacker2000]

Are you serious? Your whole business model is built on locking in users and then selling them expensive hosting.

[MaxLeiter]

If you can point out how we actually lock you in, that would be more constructive than blanket accusations. I recommend reading the linked post

[satvikpendem]

Looks good, I appreciate the level of detail especially as bad UX can cause churn on mobile. Since it's React Native, are there plans for an Android version? I guess you guys wanted to get an iOS version out first instead of releasing both in parallel, for bug testing, improvements etc?

[fernandorojo]

Overall, our focus right now is iOS, but we want to do Android at some point. Even though we used React Native, we also wrote a good amount of native Swift code under the hood to power native modules.

[jama211]

Ok, well good luck

[viccis]

I clicked through to the app's website, linked immediately in the writeup [1]. It slowed my browser (Firefox) to a crawl for 10 seconds but ultimately had no information whatsoever. Clicked the FAQ at the bottom, where the first question is "What is this?", which seems silly to have to address in a FAQ. But to answer you: It's a coding copilot app. No idea why you'd use your phone for this.

1: https://v0.app/ios

[fernandorojo]

Checking on this Firefox issue now, thanks for sharing.

[satvikpendem]

It makes more sense if you go to the main landing page: https://v0.app/

Basically like Figma Make or Lovable, a vibe coding app, except now also on mobile, which is cool.

[alwa]

I tried to look at the landing page and it crashed Mobile Safari... relaunched it, scrolled a bit down, scrolling smeared rows of pixels up my viewport rather than text. It eventually redrew and reset the viewport, I scrolled some more, then it crashed Safari again.

In the spirit of not just grumping emptily, I did just get TFA to load on desktop. I'm grateful, Fernando, for the detailed dev-to-dev style here—and I admire your commitment to a high level of polish!

I wonder, though: you point out in the article—

> Achieving native feel in this area was tedious and challenging with React Native. When v0 iOS was in public beta, Apple released iOS 26. Every time a new iOS beta version came out, our chat seemingly broke entirely. Each iOS release turned into a game of cat-and-mouse of reproducing tiny discrepancies and jitters.

This feels like a treadmill of tiny rough edges that won't be going away anytime soon, especially with your (rightfully) world-class standards. And on Apple's timetable, too: it seems like each iOS evolution will likely introduce new elements of roughness, and they'll be iterating the OS through its release cycle without regard to how it interacts with your needs or workarounds. (A mental image of the winter sport of curling comes to mind)

If you were to do it all over again, would you think about building on native technologies instead? Or do the React Native benefits outweigh the native iOS UI polish, even though "we decided to share types and helper functions, but not UI or state management"?

[fernandorojo]

> If you were to do it all over again, would you think about building on native technologies instead?

Although it took a lot of effort, it was a new set of UI patterns for React Native, and it hadn't really been done well yet.

Where most RN teams go wrong is they never dip to native code. On the contrary, we wrote a lot of native code, both for our own packages and for updating RN core itself.

The benefits with React Native's composition model are hard to beat. For example, thanks to React's composition with hooks and components, we will likely be able to open source most of the problems we solved into an easy-to-consume library. Or at least that's the hope!

[cadamsdotcom]

If you have to ask what it is, you aren’t the target audience :-)

[jama211]

This sounds profound but really isn’t, how about if we have to ask what it is _in a forum already specialised to those who could be interested_ then it demonstrates a serious communication issue?

[MaxLeiter]

We changed the link in the post to go direct to the app store, which has more info. Thanks for the feedback