Comment by mcintyre1994

You can deploy from XCode to your iPhone, and it seems to behave like any other app when you do that. I do have a paid Apple developer account, and I think I read that if you don't then you have to re-sign the app every 7 days. If you wanted a small number of users then I don't think this would work. I think you could use TestFlight, which is Apple's method for distributing an unreleased version of an app, but I'm not sure what the review process would look like for that. Android would be much easier as long as you can still sideload APKs, you could just build the APK and send it to everyone to install. I read that there were some changes to sideloading APKs but I don't know the details.

In terms of actually making the app, I don't know Swift or iOS at all so it's all generated. Usual caveats, and I'm only running them on my own phone. I ask Claude (not code) to help me with the spec, I give it some bullet points and it asks a bunch of clarifying questions then gives me a spec. I put that in a new directory, fire up Claude and use the ralph-loop plugin (https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/tree/main/plugins/...):

> /ralph-loop:ralph-loop "Implement the iOS app described in app-spec.md. You have access to xcode CLI tools. You should write tests and use them to verify your work. The task will be complete when the app is fully implemented, with all tests passing. Output <promise>COMPLETE</promise> when finished." --max-iterations 50 --completion-promise "COMPLETE"

Once it's done you can open the app in XCode, test it in a simulator, play with it and iterate a bit and then send it to your phone!

Editing to add because I can't edit the original post: I think the limiting factor here might be the concurrent sprites limit. It seems like if you're on pay-as-you-go then you can only have 3 running concurrently, and have to subscribe to get 10.