FilterHN

How we built the v0 iOS app

14 points

by MaxLeiter

6 days ago

| past

| 8 comments

| vercel.com

| HN

▲

patternMachine

5 minutes ago

[-]

This reads more like a portfolio case study than a blog post for a company. Who is the audience of this post? Isn't one of the main value props of Vercel that you don't need to know technical details like this to launch a product?

▲

gitpusher

6 days ago

[-]

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

6 days ago

[-]

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

6 days ago

[-]

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

17 minutes ago

[-]

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).

▲

jama211

3 days ago

[-]

Ok, well good luck

▲

cadamsdotcom

5 days ago

[-]

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

▲

tevon

6 days ago

[-]

Their bottom control buttons here feels like the perfect use-case for liquid glass. Really enjoying this new UI from Apple.

▲

_fzslm

6 days ago

[-]

This looks like a solidly built app, but having used React Native to ship production apps I really don't think its the way forward – nor spending development effort on making apps "look native" with Liquid Glass and the like. It's so much more brittle than building a web app, even with the impressive steps taken with e.g. the New Architecture.

When nearly everything today is a walled garden, I find it really hard to understand why we'd want to fortify those walls with any more platform-specific code. Though it's imperfect and still in development, I see much more of a future in the open web platform and wasm.

▲

pkamb

43 minutes ago

[-]

> Our goal was to build an app worthy of an Apple Design Award [...] After weeks of experimentation, we landed on React Native with Expo to achieve this.

Has a non-native app ever won an ADA?

▲

33 minutes ago

[-]

Balatro and a number of other games have. But react-native? I can't think of an example and the framework wouldn't be my choice for "award winning" design.

Watch Duty won with a Cordova app in the "Social Impact" category, so it's not impossible.

▲

rumori

5 days ago

[-]

I tried the app and dragging down on the content doesn’t dismiss the keyboard interactively like Messages, Safari or even ChatGPT does. That is usually the telltale sign that an app is not fully native, I haven’t see any cross platform framework succeeding with this particular behavior. Not the end of the world but still expected in Design Award runner ups.

▲

fernandorojo

4 days ago

[-]

Interesting, that actually should work.

Are you on iOS 26.2 by chance? I'm currently investigating a regression on interactive keyboard dismissal specific to iOS 26.2.

▲

busymom0

2 minutes ago

[-]

Note sure about 26.2 but on 26.1, setting the following on a native UITextView makes it work:

    textView.keyboardDismissMode = .interactive

Should be doable via react native too.

▲

rumori

5 days ago

[-]

After signing up with Apple sign-in, the app fails to load favorites, chats, fails to upload images and fails to submit issues. Something to look into.

▲

fernandorojo

4 days ago

[-]

Thanks for sharing, sorry about that. We had an issue on the backend with Apple sign in that we just fixed today. Mind signing out and back in to see if it's fixed?

▲

fernandorojo

6 days ago

[-]

Author of the blog post here. Happy to answer any questions.

▲

maderalabs

32 minutes ago

[-]

I'm curious how much y'all used AI in the development process of the app. Definitely a lot of thought put into the architecture as shown in the post here, what was the split of human written vs. AI-written code? Especially curious given v0 is intended for building with AI.

Really great writeup, super thoughtful! Been a v0 user and fan for awhile now, excited to give this a shot!