Hey ChatGPT - Help Me Build an iOS App Using XCode

The Objective:

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.

I'll be honest, I've learned a lot more about iOS app development than I ever knew before. Even cutting and pasting and having this conversation, was a very solid learning experience.

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.

By using this prompt, you will walk thru step by step the process of building your very own iOS app. If you haven't used XCode, never built an app, don't even know where to start but you can copy and paste, this prompt will get you to a working iOS app that you can deploy to the Apple App store. This is for those who don't know how to code, never have coded but can download XCode and want to build their very first iOS application

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.

My Reply:

1. To send whatever the user types into the text area to the
2. https://api.openai.com/v1/completions using the gpt-3.5-turbo model
3. Target audience is people who want to use the OpenAI ChatGPT chatbot
4. Nothing yet
5. Ability to save a conversation to a text file or copy to the clipboard

We're Off!

Great! Now that I have a clear understanding of your app idea, let's start building your iOS application step by step.

Step 1: Install Xcode...

This is awesome and I went back and forth copying and pasting, reporting the errors from XCode back to GPT... it was like I was doing it but had a friend next to me who could tell me why such and such a function wasn't working.

Welcome ZenChatAI:

In the end, I got a fully functional small iOS app on the App App Store that you provide your API key, and you can chat away. It has the ability to save to a file, copy to the clipboard, clear the input box, send requests and the conversations are contextual. Meaning whatever is in the text box, it appears to be able to carry on. There's debugging, scrolling text input boxes, better light and dark mode error handling, the ability to append to the saved file vs overwrite it... all things that I found while testing and went back and asked for the solution.

Enhancements:

As I went thru this and a few friends on TestFlight gave me suggestions, I just went back to ChatGPT in this conversation and just added it to add a menu, or a dialog box saying the API key wasn't set. Even the Save to File wasn't working as expected and with a few more custom properties, it now does. So you can keep going asking to add new functionality and it seems to remember your code and what you've been doing so far.

Let's Fix the Dark Mode:

Privacy:

You provide the API key. This app does nothing else in terms of tracking, auditing, ads, etc. The key is stored on your local device. No prompts are sent anywhere except to the OpenAI chat completion endpoint. It's pretty simple.

Just mind blowing given I am not a coder, tried in the past many times without success and this is my first app ever designed and appears to be working as expected. The future seems pretty bright and we're just on the tip of a very big iceberg.

FAQ:

Q: Why not monetize this app?

A: The goal was to build an app using ChatGPT v4 and given I have no business model for it other than I wanted to use it, I did not want ads and such in the app. I wanted it to be as simple and private as possible.

Q: Did you ever actually code or ask a real friend for help or go to any other website?

A: Nope. It was just a continual endless conversation. If something wasn't working, I would feed in the error and go down the rabbit hole of ChatGPT helping me solve it. When I wanted some functionality, I'd paste in the blocks of code until I said it had it in memory and then I would ask for a specific function. This was my first iOS app ever all made thru the English language.

Q: What would this have cost to build?

A: I didn't do any market research on basic app builds but if I had to venture a guess? $500? And every fix and feature would not be free.

Q: Isn't the logo in the very top image close to Open AI's?

A: Yes and once I started down the path of the Apple App Store it was picked up and rejected because of that. I've since modified the logo in version 1.2 to be completely different to get away from this.

https://zenchat.webflow.io/

Download ZenChatAI from the Apple App Store