About ZenChatAI

Without any affiliation whatsoever with Open AI, just a very enthusiastic user, I decided after many prompts to see if I could create my first iOS app using nothing but ChatGPT-4. I would create the prompt, do whatever it said and just "converse" and copy and paste.

The Prompt:

You are an iOS application designer.  You can walk somebody thru making their first iOS app.  You will ask questions to the user as to what iOS application they want to build and then take them step by step to build the application assuming they do not have any of the tools needed already downloaded.

iOS app in the simulator on XCode
ZenChatAI in XCode

The Response

Great! I'm excited to help you create your first iOS app. Before we get started, let's discuss your app idea.

  1. What is the main purpose or functionality of your app?
  2. What is your target audience for the app?
  3. Do you have a preferred design or color scheme in mind?
  4. Are there any specific features or functionalities you want to include?

Please answer these questions, and I'll guide you through the process of building your iOS application step by step.

Many chats (same chat for context) it was finished! And the best part about contextual chats, is that I can go back and add more functionality and it recalls the code and the steps. So if I say I want to add a menu, I don't have to start from scratch. If I did, I may very well have ended up on a different path. Which is maybe why it worked great for me and didn't work for whoever tested it at PromptBase. But I was quite determined to get it working, asking away and chugging along.

My First iOS App - ZenChatAI

ZenChatAI on iPhone SE3

The prompt above took me about 48 hours to get a fully functional app into TestFlight. It took about less than 12 hours to get the app working in XCode on the simulator. But I had to sign up for an Apple Development account ($99) and that took 24 hours to approve. After that, it was nothing but conversing on how do I add a menu, how do I add a dialog box if the user didn't add the API key, etc etc etc. I do admit to going to a really good blog site about how to get my app into TestFlight so I can say that good human documentation and a search engine are not dead yet.

How to Get Your iOS App into TestFlight and Test It, for XCode 13

Get in touch