Show HN: We built Lovable for Mobile Apps (uses Flutter)

getavid.dev

39 points by wcynthia 21 hours ago

Hey 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!

joeevans1000 2 hours ago

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.

horsawlarway 14 hours ago

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.

magundu 5 hours ago

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?

ZeroCool2u 6 hours ago

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!

Oras 13 hours ago

How about showing some samples created by this app? The landing page is not appealing for an app builder service.

skillwee 17 hours ago

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.

  • wcynthia 16 hours ago

    That was the idea from day one. Can't wait to ship that feature

  • echelon 12 hours ago

    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?

    • erikig 2 hours ago

      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.

lillee3377 6 hours ago

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.

BJones12 16 hours ago

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.

  • bilalq 14 hours ago

    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.

    • Oras 13 hours ago

      You can’t compare Google to a service just started

hodorwang 14 hours ago

It seems to be using Vercel to preview the app effect, which is quite interesting.

  • wcynthia 14 hours ago

    Yes, it provides pretty quick deployments. We just hit the limit a few minutes ago. Had to upgrade

    • ZeroCool2u 6 hours ago

      In Project IDX you can view Flutter Web previews as a tab in VS Code. Have you considered trying some variant of that?

  • jbirer 11 hours ago

    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.

eggsamurai 6 hours ago

Just tried it, it's awesome! Great work team! We need the ability to download code asap!

andrewstuart 12 hours ago

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.

ilrwbwrkhv 14 hours ago

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.

  • tracker1 13 hours ago

    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.

  • BoorishBears 13 hours ago

    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.

    -

    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"