App developers, I need your help! 👋 What’s the best way to get a mobile app on my iPhone, without making it publicly available on the AppStore? I mean, a completely personal app which is not intended to be released publicly ever.

Developers, what are you all building? 👀

App developers! 👋 Do you use tools like Expo to build and submit your mobile apps? Or do you build them locally? Happy for every tip, since I'm still new to app development 👀

A few days ago, I started an experiment 👀 After many years of web development, I thought about broadening my horizon by trying something completely new 🤯 Something, I've never really touched before. What I'm talking about is mobile app development, using React Native and Expo 🙌 Yes, there are definitely some similarities, due to these frameworks. Nevertheless, it's a completely different world 🤯 There are so many new things to learn, and so many things which were never relevant for building a web app. It's crazy!! Of course, AI helps building these apps, but you still need to take the time to actually understand what's happening under the hood 🤓 And honestly, I have never thought I'd build an app someday. I was always the web app guy and couldn't imagine building something else 😅 And although it's way more complicated than just deploying a web app, I kinda love the challenge and really enjoy building apps right now 😆

It's so easy to ship a web app 🙌 🔹 You build the app with a framework of your choice 🔹 You buy a domain 🔹 You deploy it where ever you prefer to Instead, shipping a mobile app seems to be a pain 🤯 It might be a skill issue, because I'm coming from years of experience in web development 😅 But the overall process to get an app into the app stores seems way more complex...

Yesterday night, I started a React Native + Expo experiment 👀 Even if you know typescript and React, it's a completely different world, in comparison to web development 🤯 And yes, AI can write all the code for you. But is that the right approach? 🤔 I had one big learning: If you start with a new framework, tool, programming language, etc... learn it properly by hand, before you outsource everything to AI. ☝️ AI makes us fast, if we know how things work and can decide quickly if a change can be committed or not. Shipping back boxes is not what we should aim for.

It's great that you can host all kind of apps on Laravel Cloud now! But the naming is actually quite bad. I know where they are coming from, so it absolutely makes sense. But everyone who is not familiar with the Laravel ecosystem thinks it's only for Laravel apps. I'm curious if they already considered a rebranding 🤔 I honestly see a huge chance for Laravel Cloud to become a popular choice for Cloud hosting in general.

Look what I got here! 👀 I finally switched back to Claude Code.

I made 0$ in September. And I'm happy! 😃 Why? Because I just love building cool things and I'm really enjoying the process, right now 😎 At some point in the future, I'd love to start a business and try to earn money from my side-projects 🤓 But today, I'm just happy of not having the struggles to run a business (including business administration, taxes, legal stuff, compliance, etc...) and not having the need to necessarily run a profitable business, while watching my runway getting shorter and shorter 🫠 Always remember: do what you love to do! 🙌

Unpopular opinion: I'd choose a world where AI never existed 👀

Imagine you could remove AI from this world, for everyone, forever. Would you press that button? 👀

Everyone is starting to self-host! 😎 And i just figured out you can host all kind of apps on Laravel Cloud, including node.js apps 👀

I really like Laravel Cloud, especially their easy provisioning of databases. But the Postgres databases are really missing a very important feature: Disable the public endpoint. Unfortunately, this option is only available for MySQL databases.

I'm migrating more of my apps to Laravel Cloud 👀 I think it's one of the best way to ship your apps, today. Such a good platform, peak support and low costs due to "scale-to-zero" 👌 Who else is migrating?

And... they have "scale-to-zero", meaning your low-traffic side projects can run at very low costs.

Looks like the ride is over, quite soon! 📉 AI is making my apps obsolete. Do you see a similar trend for your apps?