Show HN: We built Lovable for Mobile Apps (uses Flutter)
getavid.devHey HN. We built an AI agent, Avid, that creates beautiful Flutter Apps, much like v0 or Lovable. The agent carefully makes UI UX considerations, generates Flutter code, and you get a preview on your browser.
I've gone through lots and lots of iterations to help the agent produce beautiful results. Would love your feedback.
Ability to download App files and flutter code should be ready this coming week. Have a look and let me know what you think!
Won't sign up with Google or Microsoft, lol. Ever. And just a pro tip for getting other users that won't be bothered by that: after one types in the app idea it goes instantly to a sign up and feels weird. You should tease the user with some output to get them to want to sign up.
Thanks for the tip!
You don't accept a signup that isn't Google or Microsoft. So I guess I won't sign up...
You also don't tell me this until I've already written a prompt, which is frustrating.
shitiest ux pattern ever
Hmm, I appreciate that there is a cost to generation, but a monthly limit of 100 questions seems quite low for a 20$ plan for hobbyists. How am I going to iterate, make changes etc when I have to keep glancing at the limits to make sure I won't get stuck for this month? It feels a bit like an electric car with 200km range.. fine for staying in the city, and yes you can drive to another city, but if you do you're going to be stressed and thinking about the next charger the whole ride. So similarly I feel if i eree to sign up I'd end up frustrated.
Would it not be better for the audience and use case to use a top up model? And might you be able to offer a 5-10 message free plan?
I totally get what you mean. We do offer 15 free messages for the month, and you can come back the next month for 15 more (capped at 5 a day). The AI generation costs do factor in a lot towards the pricing, among other things like infra. Hopefully with future reduced costs we can offer those savings back to you.
Whoever you're, and whenever you're getting the information, you're Miss something.
From a business development manager point of view, it's horrible experience. Nobody will pay for you, when you can't assure them it's worth it.
There's just a 5 message limit in free plan. How can a man decide whether it's worth it just by 5 text. There are hundreds out there.
The finest thing in startups is sales and viable product. I haven't explored it fully, as I won't pay to check someone product, but to stand out, you need to think business development differently.
For word of mouth, or initial growth, you have to showcase what's the USP you're providing, along with some proof. And users are the best proofs that you can showcase.
If you wanna make just some thousands, then it may work. For a successful startup, it's off track.
Good work.
Recently I tried rork.app to generate mobile games for my kids. It is really amazing. They also give published URL which we can directly use in the mobile.
Is there any significant difference in code generation?
I am not sure what you mean by difference in code generation.
I mean Flutter, React native or Native code.
This generates Flutter whereas rork generates react native.
Sounds promising. What Lovable or Bolt is missing is ability to visually customize the output (like a no-code tool). Imagine if you could combine your AI agent + Flutterflow like No Code abilities? That would be magical.
Are Lovable, Bolt, or V0 good? I haven't tried them yet.
Are these tools going to replace application designers? How much work can they do, and how much remains to be done by engineers? Can they engineer complicated apps, or do they reproduce simple apps from a training set? (TODO list apps, etc.)
Is the code these systems output any good? Maintainable and extensible?
They are surprisingly capable given how long they’ve been around and they allow you to eject and fully manage your code via git. I’d say try them out and share your experience.
That was the idea from day one. Can't wait to ship that feature
Hi, I'm trying avid to build a simple app with Pomodoro timer, it seems a bit slow and it's a pity that it accepts authentication only with Google or Microsoft. Anyway, congratulations
Thanks for your feedback. And for giving Avid a try! I'm not particularly impressed by the speed myself and it's definitely something we're working on
Like others I never made it passed the login screen. And I see nothing before that that would make me want to hand over an email address.
It's nothing much, but I just added sample screenshots of apps to the homepage. Plan is to eventually be able to browse through generated app samples interactively
How about showing some samples created by this app? The landing page is not appealing for an app builder service.
Yeah, it's part of our roadmap and will be shipping soon!
I came across a0.dev the other day, and I think your focus on Flutter specifically is a nice differentiator. I'll try it!
Nice to hear. Thanks!
What all these ai apps have is a certain look. it's like the bootstrap look from the early days. you know the app is being made by somebody who doesn't really care about quality.
I think there is going to be a counter reaction towards artisanal apps which will come out of all of this.
Just how WordPress runs 70% of the web but it's 70% of the crap web.
Similarly AI will maybe create 70% of the apps but it will be 70% of the crap apps.
And this is not some sort of reflection on AI. AI is actually great tech, but it's more about the person making the app and the proof of work required to show how much they care about the product. Or in this case these apps will be associated with shady fly-by-night companies trying to sell something.
I'm like AI and I still agree.
It's because models struggle with design, period.
They're not great at getting things like margins right and consistent across an entire app while they're trying to follow instructions for a complex design.
Similarly they understand contrast if prompted directly, but while they're implementing a complex design they'll tend to still end up making poor contrast choices with tons of default fonts everywhere.
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If you iterate more and provide images back to the model, you can start to get something better, but that's tedious and the opposite of what most people using these tools are trying to do.
And V0 defaults to the absolutely awful ui/shadcn which is the worst possible idea as AI driven development becomes popular (let's create a UI library with minimal design tokens, no package name, no guarantees on consistency or versioning because you literally cut and paste it and update it by applying diffs.)
I'm personally excited to see if larger models with multimodal output will be able to generate detailed coherent UIs, that I can then implement using a copilot for tedious parts.
To me that's the ideal flow to get something that doesn't have the "V0 Look"
I'm going to have to completely disagree on Bootstrap. The use of Bootstrap isn't an indication on a lack of quality, it's an indication on a desire for a decent UI from the start. The fact that it was widely used isn't necessarily reflective of a given app.
Bootstrap, Material, etc. are all just established tools in terms of visual usability and consistency. Many people are far more concerned about having something functional over something that looks completely unique or different.
Personally, I tend to dislike most UI/UX experiments in terms of usability. Not all, but definitely most are just bad compared to what most people are used to.
As someone who is capable of programming, writing HTML, etc., but not of graphic design or UI/UX design, I can tell you that 100% of the reason the little things I wrote used bootstrap is because I really did care about quality, and bootstrap was the quickest and easiest way for me to get something "pretty good" straight out of the gate without having to spend ten times as long tweaking my design to get something a tenth as usable.
The problem is that the people who are lazy about it are obvious about it, so lazy sites that use bootstrap are obviously using bootstrap, and lazy sites that use wordpress are obviously using wordpress, but it's just confirmation bias.
It's just the Girls Suck at Math problem[0] all over again.
[0] https://xkcd.com/385/
This is very cool. I've been using Project IDX and the Roo AI extension to work on Flutter apps in YOLO mode and its been pretty cool. The only issue is the model can't interact with the Android Emulator preview. Still trying to figure out a workaround to that, but if anyone has any ideas would love to hear!
Well I've used Loveable and now this and his description is right. It is Loveable for mobile apps. Something I've wanted since I found Loveable. It suits my needs and built what I needed. Just waiting for downloads to be implemented. Great work wcynthia.
Whenever I check out a new way of making stuff I want lots of working examples that I can actually use - a gallery/showcase.
I’m not going to use a new technology just to find out what it looks like.
IMO your front page should be minimum 10 examples apps to download.
Just added screenshots to the homepage. Not exactly the best showcase, but it's a start. We'll be adding interactive mobile apps to browse through soon
You may want to change the name. Avid is also a very well recognized brand, and you won't rank highly for it either in search or in people's brains.
I feel like these concerns are often overstated. Gemini was a well-known crypto exchange. Outside of their niche, I don't think Avid is something the average person is familiar with. Even the average software engineer.
You can’t compare Google to a service just started
Why are the praising accounts green? Am I missing something?
It feels like these developers no longer even care about how blatant the sockpuppeting is. Potentially because AI can't tell anyway.
Says by a green account. Oh the irony!
Exactly - at least I make the effort to put up a veneer of realism, whereas they're one-day old, single-comment accounts! (/s, though I hope that's not necessary on here :))
It seems to be using Vercel to preview the app effect, which is quite interesting.
Yes, it provides pretty quick deployments. We just hit the limit a few minutes ago. Had to upgrade
In Project IDX you can view Flutter Web previews as a tab in VS Code. Have you considered trying some variant of that?
It's been some time that I worked with React Native, but I think you can use react-native-web to create web previews of the mobile app.
why flutter instead of react native? Flutter is destined to be a dead language because of google
Flutter is better positioned for our use case.
Just tried it, it's awesome! Great work team! We need the ability to download code asap!
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