What this article covers

  • Getting your setup ready for iPhone app development

First, you'll need a Mac 😱

This may already feel like a pretty high hurdle. But the fact is, a Mac is by far the best environment for developing iPhone apps. For a simple app, you can get by on Windows, but when your app uses the phone's own built-in features — as our "AI TV Audio Guide" does — you really do need to develop on a Mac.

And this isn't just about this one app: if you plan to keep building iPhone apps yourself, you'll want at minimum an M1 chip with 16GB of memory. If you already have a Mac, you're all set. If you need to buy a used MacBook or Mac mini with those specs, though, expect to pay somewhere around 80,000–90,000 yen even today. Committing to that kind of investment takes some resolve. Unfortunately, Macs cost money!

Even using your own app costs about 16,000 yen a year?!

Sorry to pile on, but there's also a cost just to use the app you've built. You might be thinking, "But I'm only making an app for myself!" — and yet an app you build yourself can only be installed and used on your own iPhone for 7 days. Of course, if you rebuild and reinstall it every 7 days, you can keep using it free forever. But plugging your phone into your Mac and reinstalling every single week isn't realistic. So, to install it once and keep using it indefinitely, you need to enroll in the Apple Developer Program and pay $99 per year.

Buying an expensive Mac and paying 16,000 yen every year on top of that... iPhone app development really is a high hurdle.

Can't I just use an Android phone?

That's where Android phones like the Google Pixel come in as an alternative. If you have a Windows machine, this may be the better route for you. To begin with, you can install your own app on your own Android phone and keep using it free, forever. That's great news!

That said, if you don't already have an Android device, you'll need to buy one. The audio guide app we're building needs decent specs, so depending on the model you may be looking at 60,000–70,000 yen. That's cheaper than buying a new Mac, but it's still a real investment. On the other hand, if you think of it as a dedicated device that compensates for a visual impairment, keeping it separate from an everyday phone can actually be quite convenient in some situations.

So what should I do?

One thing is certain: the AI capabilities built into smartphones — iPhone and Android alike — will keep improving, and that will make it easier and easier to build features that support a person's specific needs. Our recommendation is to decide which development environment to set up based on which kind of phone the person you're supporting actually wants to use.

What you need to develop iPhone apps on a Mac

In this series we'll proceed on the assumption that you're building an iPhone app, but we'll also cover Android app development in a separate series, with detailed explanations so you can build the same app on Windows and Android. The "AI TV Audio Guide" is easy to build with AI on either platform.

As mentioned above, a Mac with an M1 chip and 16GB or more of memory will handle this app development without any trouble. Beyond that, all you need is the iPhone you'll install the app on and a USB-C cable to connect it to your Mac. We'll ask AI to handle setting up everything else you need for development, so for now, just get the hardware ready.

In the next article, we'll finally have AI build our "TV Audio Guide"!