Indie developer built an iPhone app using ChatGPT

He tried to place the app in App Store, but Apple rejected it.

Swiss developer Morten Just used ChatGPT to build a full iPhone application from scratch. He created the app that gives five daily movie recommendations without writing a single line of code. A full report about development on his Twitter.

At first, Morten asked ChatGPT to create an iOS application that could recommend five movies every day. A few minutes later he got the first version of that app, but the chatbot produced a few errors. ChatGPT solved this issue by itself after the second query. During this GPT-4 asked to add debug print statements to the code (a method used by programmers to figure out what the code does). With those print statements, it fixed one of the hairier bugs.

After this developer asked to add movie trailers and available streaming services. “Just like that, I now have an app I'm pretty sure I'm going to use again tomorrow’, wrote Morten. He confirm that he didn’t write a single line of code and didn’t even pick API. Midjourney helped the developer to create an icon for the app.

Morten submitted the app to the App Store, but a few days later Apple rejected it. “The reasons are fair and have nothing to do with AI”, the developer wrote on Twitter.