What you'll build
Meet the capstone app you'll ship to the App Store, and see how AI changes what one person can build.
By the end of this course you will have a real iOS app installed on your own iPhone from the App Store — not a tutorial toy that only runs in a simulator. You'll take it from a one-sentence idea to a signed, reviewed, publicly downloadable product.
The running example is DayOne Journal — a small journaling app with an AI twist: you write a short entry, and the app uses a language model to suggest a title, detect your mood, and surface a reflective follow-up question. It's deliberately modest. The point isn't the app; it's that you'll touch every part of the pipeline a professional app needs: UI, local storage, networking, a real AI feature, testing, and the full App Store submission.
- A polished SwiftUI interface with multiple screens and navigation
- Local persistence so entries survive app restarts (SwiftData)
- A genuine AI feature powered by a hosted language model API
- An app icon, launch screen, and accessibility support
- A build uploaded to TestFlight and submitted to the App Store
This course assumes zero prior Swift experience. You'll use AI as a pair-programmer to write most of the code — but you'll learn to read, steer, and fix what it produces. That skill is the actual product of this course.
Why AI changes the math
Historically, shipping an iOS app meant months of learning Swift, UIKit, Apple's frameworks, and the byzantine signing-and-submission process. AI collapses the writing part — but not the understanding part. A model will happily generate 200 lines of Swift that look perfect and crash on launch. Your job is to describe intent precisely, verify the result, and know enough to catch the 10% that's wrong. This course teaches exactly that loop.
Xcode is free, and an AI assistant's free tier is fine to start — you can complete Modules 1–4 spending nothing. Shipping involves two real costs: Apple's Developer Program ($99/year, needed in Module 8) and a few dollars of AI API credit for the in-app AI feature (Module 5). No other purchases required.
Build along. Keep Xcode open in one window and this lesson in another. Every lab produces a piece of the real app — by Module 8 the labs are your shippable product.