Replit just changed the game with a new AI mobile app builder

By dan - On

If you follow me on Instagram or LinkedIn, you will have seen I’ve been playing around with vibe coding tools for a while now. Last week I thought it would be fun to use my domain contentmachine.com to build a little tool to help me with the content I’m creating. I then built a mobile app for it using what I thought was very exciting technology.

The very next day, Replit changed everything. Read on to see what’s happening in the world of AI-based coding tools (Vibe Coding).

So, at the start of the week I started using Replit to start building a the Content Machine web app. What I wanted was a Kanban style board like Trello, specifically for managing content ideas. The app is now live (not for the public yet) and I’ve been using it all week.

Replit does an insanely good job at building web apps. In the last few months it’s really come alive, to the point where you can build super useful apps very quickly.

Related: 2026 is the year AI coding changes everything

Here is what the app looks like on my laptop.

You can see it’s based around a basic calendar. Each idea has a card, and you can drag and drop cards around, add information to them and mark them as complete once you publish the content.

It also has an ideas area where it uses AI to help you come up with new content ideas.

This part of the app is quite basic currently, but it’s something I can build on later on. I figure if you have all of your posts in there, and you’ve made some notes on what worked and what didn’t for each post, gradually the AI can learn what works well for you.

Now, here’s where it gets interesting. A mobile app for something like this is a must, because no one thinks of ideas when their are at their computer. So I built a fully functional mobile app that I’m now using. It’s in the process of App Store approval by Apple, but I’ve got it on my phone using Apple’s TestFlight tool and I’ve been using it all week. I built the app using X Code on my mac with the help of Claude Code.

X Code isn’t super simple to use, it’s specific Apple software and you kind of need a PHD to use it. However, Claude Code is very good running locally and did a great job building the app for / with me. Still, it’s quite a lot of testing and going through the laborious processes with Apple. Creating builds, and uploading, waiting for processing etc all for every basic change. It’s a fair bit of work.

You can see in the screenshot above, the X Code project in the background and Claude Code running in the foreground suggesting changes to files, and then going ahead and making them.

I was pretty surprised I was able to build a fully native iPhone app, it’s much more complicated than a traditional web app, but the AI is so good now it’s not that hard at all.

The app will be free and available to the public soon. If you want to get early access go to https://contentmachine.com/ and leave your email to be notified. Also feel free to send me feature ideas, I’d love to know what people would like to see in it.

A game-changing Replit feature

All of that said, I obviously had no idea that Replit were about to completely change the game. I work up the day after I sent the app to the App Store, to see the new Replit fully native mobile app builder, and my head exploded.

All of my apps are built in Replit already. When I made the mobile app for Content Machine, we are really just building the user interface and talking to the Replit app for all the functionality. So the idea of doing the whole thing in Replit is very exciting! I had to give it a go, and it’s truly game changing.

I had already built the Content Machine app, so I couldn’t use it for that. However I have other apps that I’ve built for my Coffee Roasting business, that are currently web only.

The one we use the most, is a rostering and training tool called Jessop. Our team use to log their shifts, complete mandatory training, and create and view SOPs. This is what the web version looks like. This is logged in as a manager, who can view all shifts and create training programs etc.

Staff access the app via a mobile website, which is working quite well, but ideally we’d have an app. There’s a lot more you can do with an app, and it’s more professional. So I was planning on building an app eventually, but it’s historically been quite difficult, so it wasn’t super high up the list of priorities.

That all changed yesterday when Replit announced their new mobile builder. Now you can build fully native mobile apps just via your browser in Replit. No X Code, no local AI running on terminal. No more builds or sending to Appstore Connect and waiting for builds to complete. No more TestFlight. None of it. You create the app, preview it right there in the browser, and even preview immediately on your phone using Expo Go. It’s truly mind blowing. I spent last night building the mobile app for Jessop using Replit.

After a few hours I had a fully functioning native mobile app for Jessop. It’s hard to put into words how easy it is to build an iPhone app using this new Replit builder than the tools available before yesterday. The ability to view changes immediately is a game changer, doing everything on Replit not having 2 systems struggling to talk to each other is huge, and Replit just just downright fun to use.

Here’s how the app is looking.

The speed at which you can build native phone apps using Replit now is crazy, I think there’s going to be a huge influx of apps to the app store now that anyone can build apps.

Very exciting times, get building!

p.s. I’ve started creating videos on Instagram and TikTok about the stuff I’m working on, follow along. You can also sign up for my weekly emails here.

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