Launch HN: A0.dev (YC W25) – React Native App Generator
35 comments
·February 11, 2025sputknick
I'm a fan, and this is something I would use, but I would prefer a per-use or per-token payment option. That would get me to use it more often. As it stands, I might sign up for one or two months a year.
preaching5271
How is this different from just using Cursor on my react-native codebase? Cursor in agent mode means: no copy paste, implements features and fixes errors iteratively, knows my codebase and adheres to existing patterns. If I need changes, I just ask Cursor and preview live app changes locally
justchad
Cursor is quite a bit better as well at not adding erroneous code. Was testing a0 and it kept getting stuck in endless loops of errors. I'm sure they'll improve but it's pretty rough right now.
wg0
Have watched video. But haven'tried yet.
Tons of work work to package everything in minimal decent functional product.
Great work, looking forward to use (and possibly subscribe) later.
fuddle
The chess game it generated is pretty sad: https://ibb.co/5Xk57m5k
redeux
Cool, I’ll play black
solardev
Looks like a fun mix between chess and a tower defense game like Orcs Must Die[1]. I'd play that!
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/2273980/Orcs_Must_Die_Dea...
kristopolous
That's a great design.
rushingcreek
This is an awesome demo and I hope you succeed.
I've dabbled in building a tool of this type and something I've learned is that making single-task demo apps (like chess or snake game) is much faster and simpler than making production-grade apps that could make a real business. In fact, the process of making these demo apps production ready (polishing the UI, adding features, etc.) would usually result in the user giving up. In our implementation, it was much trickier for the system to understand the nuances of polishing than getting the broad strokes of the initial demo. I'd love to know if you've ran into this and what your thoughts are on getting around it.
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chaosprint
Your title is honest, and your description of the limitations is honest. It is also pragmatic to allow you to try it without registering. This is the way to success.
sethburster
Thankyou!
awaseem
This is awesome for RN devs, any chance to build something like this for Swift UI? I know it might be kind hard to get native components rendering in a webui like this. Anyway super cool!
aylmao
The UI is very well built! Love the details too— from the line additions/deletions live counter while the AI is generating code, to the logo that points towards your cursor.
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growthwtf
So, I use a lot of AI tools. I would say that baseline for 'coding agents' today to make it usable is that you need to recover from error messages and lints automatically. Once you can do that it will be a lot easier to use.
instagary
Congrats on the launch!
This kinda reminds me of Expo snacks (https://snack.expo.dev/), but with a chat.
Hi HN — we’re Seth and Ayo and we’re building a0.dev (https://a0.dev). a0.dev is a platform built to cut down React Native development time from weeks to just a few hours.
We’ve been building mobile apps together for seven years and have had several successes. One thing that’s always bothered us though is how much harder it is to build a mobile app than a website. If you’ve built an app with react native before you’re familiar with the pains of working with both Xcode and Android Studio, writing tons of boilerplate before you can even start making the app, setting up state management, and of course going through the dreaded app review. We decided to build a platform that would make the app development process faster.
We’ve seen the success of new code-gen platforms like v0 and wanted something for react native that goes further. We built an AI app generator that takes a user's prompt and creates a custom react native app with an instant live preview.
Here’s a 5min demo where we recreated the Hacker News UI: https://youtu.be/f3lzBRBUous
a0.dev is great for quickly prototyping components and screens in React Native and users are able to copy the code from our generator into their preferred development environment. Our landing page has a couple of example prompts, but we encourage you to get creative when trying it out. We’ve had success generating not only functional screens like an Instagram Feed but also 2d games like Minesweeper or Flappy Bird.
Our chat has a “UI Expert” and “Advanced Logic” model users can switch between depending on the task at hand. Users can upgrade from working on a single screen to creating a full app by clicking on the “Need a Full App” button in the top right of the page. This changes the scope from a standalone chat with a single file to a full project that can include multiple chats and files. We launched an IOS app that users can download in order to preview the app on a physical device. We find that many apps look and feel better on a physical device so we recommend trying it out.
Our goal is to continue to improve the app generator while adding more features to help developers get their apps to the app store and make money from those apps. The main features on our roadmap right now are a Supabase integration and a “one click submit” button to let developers publish their app to the App Store.
There are a few limitations to note. We’re working on releasing our Android app, but Android users should be able to preview their app using the Expo Go App. The app is running React Native Web in the browser so any dependencies that don’t support web won’t work with the web preview but should work on the phone. There are also some dependencies that our system can’t handle because they require native modules that aren’t packaged into our app currently.
We hope you guys will check it out and try making an app with a0.dev. We’re available on Discord around the clock to help developers with any problems they may face and want to guide people to actually releasing their app on the App Store. Let us know what features you’d like to see and any problems you’ve faced building apps, we’d love to hear about your experience.
Here’s the link again to check it out: (https://a0.dev)
We dropped the need to sign up for the first message so you can just jump in and try it out.
Looking forward to your thoughts!