davidoort

Apple is not necessarily blocking vibecoded apps, they are blocking vibecoding tools like Bloom. So it doesn't prevent people from submitting vibecoded apps to the App Store, but it does prevent people from being able to build personal apps from their phone through something like the Bloom mobile app.

I have nothing against quality control for what gets published to the App Store, but this change also blocks developer tools like Expo Go and Bloom where the main benefit is to be able to test apps natively on your phone without needing to go through a TestFlight build.

exactly, kinda makes you wonder what the "i" in iphone stands for...

Over the past few weeks, Apple started banning and blocking updates for vibe coding apps on the App Store under Guideline 2.5.2. Numerous similar apps were affected, including a few other YC cos (Replit, Expo, a0, etc). Our iOS app was approved and shipping updates for months before Apple reversed course with limited explanation and no clear path to compliance.

Instead of waiting it out, we launched early access for Bloom on Android and made two funny Anthropic-ad style videos about the situation.

1. "Everyone can build apps now. Just not on iPhone." https://x.com/CreateWithBloom/status/2036072867738071114

"Software is becoming yours. Just not on iOS." https://x.com/CreateWithBloom/status/2036435705438642408

We're sharing this here for a few reasons:

If you're building anything that generates or previews code on iOS, heads up. Guideline 2.5.2 is broad enough that it could apply to a lot of apps beyond vibe coding tools. Worth being aware of.

If you've dealt with sudden App Store rejections that contradicted previous approvals, we'd love to compare notes. We're still figuring out the best way to handle this.

If you think this story is worth sharing, it helps. A repost of the video or blog goes a long way.

Full breakdown on our blog: https://bloom.diy/blog/apple-is-banning-vibecoding-apps-we-r...

Happy to answer any questions about what the review process looked like from our side.

David from Bloom

This is so sick!

Thanks to Genkit's open plugin ecosystem, there's not only support for Ollama but also:

- OpenAI - Groq - Anthropic - Cohere - Mistral

Check it out: https://github.com/TheFireCo/genkit-plugins

Google just announced Firebase Genkit at the Google I/O Developer Keynote. Firebase Genkit is an open source framework that helps you build, deploy, and monitor production-ready AI-powered apps.

In case y’all want to build on Genkit and want to use models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Cohere, Groq, Mistral, etc - we’ve just open-sourced our community plugins here: https://github.com/TheFireCo/genkit-plugins

Some plugins are still in the making, so code contributions are more than welcome!

I truly appreciate all the honest feedback and tough love

Let me share a bit more about why and how we're building Giftit:

The problem - it's hard to give both fitting AND surprising gifts.

We've surveyed hundreds of people including our beta testing community and stumbled across the following conundrum:

- 90% of people don't share their wishes unless they're asked

- 75% of people don't know what to get and don't want to ask

This obviously leads to an information gap between gift-givers and receivers which frequently leads to crappy, impersonal, duplicate gifts or no gifts at all.

In the US alone, economist Prof. Waldfogel has estimated that this racks up to a $20B loss which represents the difference in actual value of the gift and the perceived value by the receiver.

Our solution - Giftit's social wishlists and the Sherlock chatbot

- Once you download the free Giftit app on iOS or Android, you'll be able to select any of your contacts (who don't need to be on Giftit)

- Sherlock will then anonymously reach out to this contact on either iMessage or WhatsApp and start chatting with them about their wishes, current interests, etc.

- From the app, you'll be able to see in real time the transcript of the conversation of Sherlock with your contact and get shoppable gift suggestions.

- If Sherlock is not asking something specific you want to know about, you can inject a message into the conversation which will directly show up on the chat app of your contact (e.g. "what's your dress size?")

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I'll be the first to admit that this is definitely not for everyone. I would personally not use this for gifting someone I spend a lot of time around since I typically know what they're into. However, there's a long tail of people in my life like old friends, family, etc that I live far away from and that I'm a bit more clueless on.

If you're someone that doesn't mind asking directly for people's wishes or sharing them without being asked, then this is probably also not for you.

I encourage you all to give it a try and share more feedback