[CitrusFruits]

My dad was a software engineer when he was younger, but his skills atrophied over the decades as he worked his way into upper management and spent all of his non work time caring for the family. For the past 8 years or he's had an app idea for something he wants himself on his phone that he's been dying to make, but just didn't have the means to do it. He tried no code/lo code options, but they were just to limited in their API coverage. Finally though in the past 3 months he's been able to fulfill his own personal dream to make that app with an AI driven platform. He has been thrilled and I think he's done a great job developing it. It's an incredibly niche audience and he knows that, but just thought I'd share that for some people out there it's legitimately a dream come true to be able to make and publish an app, while still being clear eyed that it's not going to make you any money.

For those that are curious, it is an alarm app with natures sounds instead of dings and beeps or jingles. As he puts it "none of the other existing apps have good enough sounds or interfaces".

[romanoonhn]

I'm curious to check the app out, waking up with nature sound is the only alarm I tolerate!

[j_bum]

+1, I’d love to see the app.

[CitrusFruits]

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/naturecalls-alarm-reminder/id6...

Two things to call out: the first is it does not work if your phone is on do not disturb or silent/vibrate. He's aware of this and it's a permissions thing you need an exception for. He's applied for the exception but it's unlikely he'll get it because it's supposed to be for stuff that's like life or death. I think for his usage he's OK with that, and he has spent a lot of time working on it the past months so he just wanted to ship it at this point. The second is that it's obviously paid. I think that's fine if he had gotten the permission unblocked but I'd be a little hesitant to recommend buying it right now.

[kdheiwns]

This is one of the cases where I do think AI development is handy. There are loads of simple apps (like in your example, an alarm with custom sounds) that someone could crank out if they take a couple weeks to learn some frameworks and a language. Or they could get some ad-filled slop app from the App Store that'll harvest their personal data and send it off to some foreign intelligence agency to spy on them and share it with spammers. Neither option is appealing to most people.

But AI can churn it out in a few minutes, and a human can go in to tweak things manually to their needs.

I recently did it with a little audio editing app. I needed something to edit sound effects for a game in a specific way. Learning about audio programming and whatever would've taken me a lot of time, and I put it off forever since even figuring out where to begin was a hassle. I asked an AI to make a basic app that did what I wanted and I put on a few finishing touches. Took about 10 minutes and works fine for my purposes.

[rawgabbit]

What AI driven platform did he use to create the app?

[sph]

Boomers are back into the workforce, baby!