Bitrig for iOS Early Access
Turn your ideas into apps in seconds, just by chatting with AI. No programming languages to learn, no complex tools to set up.
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Bitrig speaks Swift and SwiftUI. Your apps are built with the same technologies Apple uses, and can tap into powerful features like your health data, notifications, and Home Screen widgets.
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It’s always in your pocket, so you can experiment whenever and wherever inspiration strikes.
Via Edward Sanchez:
The fathers of SwiftUI left Apple and are working on a new project together to create native apps in with phone just through prompting! Super impressive technology!
Jacob Xiao and Kyle Macomber presented SwiftUI at WWDC 2019.
Bitrig builds Swift and SwiftUI apps, which run on your iPhone using a custom Swift interpreter.
Your apps call directly into the native SDK, so they can do things like access health data, post user notifications, and play haptics.
We’re ingesting the iOS SDK into bitrig piece-by-piece. Tell us what you’re building, we’ll prioritize what you need!
It’s a custom interpreter for swift, written in swift. Whenever it encounters library calls, the interpreter makes native calls.
While shipping, we ship the swift code that runs natively and compiled using the actual compiler.
This sounds great, though I don’t understand how it’s compatible with the App Review Guidelines.
Today we’re launching TestFlight integration in bitrig.
Now you can vibe code, test, and deploy Swift apps. All from your iPhone.
Seeing Bitrig hot-reloading code changes makes me wonder why hasn’t Apple brought us something like that in years instead of booting a simulator within Xcode and labelling it as previews.
Interesting that the payments link goes to Stripe instead of using in-app purchases, and that you can use it to distribute native code outside of the App Store.
Previously:
- Tim, Don’t Kill My Vibe
- Vibe Coding
- Skip 1.0
- Abrahams on the Design of Swift
- SwiftUI and Combine
- Chris Lattner Is Leaving Apple
- Briefs Ships
- Briefs Rejected From the App Store, Again
- Briefs in App Store Limbo
- Briefs Rejected From the App Store
- App Store Changes
- More on Sections 3.3.1 and 3.2.2
Update (2025-08-21): It’s now shipped to the App Store (YouTube).
9 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
I think it’s fine to use AI tools but I’m highly skeptical of claims like this:
> Turn your ideas into apps in seconds, just by chatting with AI. No programming languages to learn,
Making tools for people who don’t know how to code to “vibe code” apps …which means once they hit a bug that the AI doesn’t know how to fix they’ve got nothing. That's like me coming to your house with some FlexSeal tape claiming you don't need to hire a plumber.
It feels misleading to me to target non-developers with marketing material like this.
And then there is the SwiftUI factor 😬...
This is actually very close to what I had/have in mind for SwiftScript (+UI). Minus the AI part of course, but they had to get the VC money.
During development you have the interpreter giving you fast cycles, and during deployment, you use the actual compiler. My idea is/was to go SwiftScript => JSC (to avoid having to implement the interpreter, and also because it might be kinda cool for web stuff anyways).
Wrt
> I don’t understand how it’s compatible with the App Review Guidelines
=> "While shipping, we ship the swift code that runs natively and compiled *using the actual compiler*"
@Helge But what does shipping have to do with it? Everything that happens before that would seem to fall under the same restrictions that have beset iOS programming apps for the last 15 years or so.
Only AppStore review (kinda) enforces the "free form" programming restrictions? Not quite sure I understand the question. During development I can load arbitrary code into the simulator or device.
Are you concerned about JIT availability? That might not be available even during development. They even explicitly mention it being an interpreter.
@Helge Yes, App Review.
2.5.2 Apps should be self-contained in their bundles, and may not read or write data outside the designated container area, nor may they download, install, or execute code which introduces or changes features or functionality of the app, including other apps. Educational apps designed to teach, develop, or allow students to test executable code may, in limited circumstances, download code provided that such code is not used for other purposes. Such apps must make the source code provided by the app completely viewable and editable by the user.
This applies even without JIT. During development you can load code from your Mac, so the guidelines don’t apply, but my understanding is that Bitrig is generating and running the code on the iPhone.
Ah right, yes. I assumed you'd run it locally during the development phase (looking from my approach to it). Though in a way that isn't really different to the Python etc dev environments which are available on the AppStore? I think App Review had some wording for that. Like scripting is allowed if it isn't the apps themselves being based on scripting but being a dev environment instead, where the user writes the scripts, which matches.
And then the compilation w/ the real compiler covers the next step of actually App Store deployment.
@Helge Well, but they have been harassing Python dev environments, and, of course, Briefs. I wonder if Bitrig is running the AI all on device, because if not it would be downloading code, which is a separate violation—only allowed for educational apps.
