Kicking off work on the Tuist iOS app

We love iOS apps – after all, working on iOS apps is how Tuist came to be. However, until now, we haven’t had any iOS app that we could develop in our day-to-day. That’s about to change. We’re starting to work on a native Tuist iOS app and we couldn’t be more excited.

As the Tuist platform grows, we started to see opportunities for things to be accessible on the go – and thus a great fit for an iOS app. We will start with integrating previews. Wouldn’t it be amazing if you could see latest previews for your project and install them directly from an app on your phone?

And we’d love to include other parts of the Tuist dashboard directly in the app such as the overview page with high-level charts or a list of recent runs. There are some features that are not a great fit, such as a the visual breakdown of bundles. We’ll still resort to web in those cases – and focus on flows more useful on mobile, similar to how GitHub app doesn’t have and doesn’t aim to have feature parity with web. But being able to do things like respond to notifications on the go from a well-polished app is amazing and we want to enable you doing that.

And of course, the whole app will be open source – and we’d love for you to contribute. We’ve kicked off things in this PR and once it’s merged, anyone should be able to start contributing using our public server API. If you’d like to contribute to the iOS app, let us know below :point_down: We’ll also soon be coming with more resources for how to contribute and with a list of tasks to work on.

The Tuist iOS app will not only be a great addition to the Tuist platform, but also a way for us to better emphatize with any pains and get ideas for new features.

Here’s a very early preview of installing a Tuist preview of the Tuist iOS app … from the new Tuist iOS app :smile:

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This is really cool to see, love that it’s open source.

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super cool! I have a few questions:
what is the mechanism for allowing the device to install the app? does it have to be registered in the developer portal or could I run this and install builds on any device?

will this be compatible with self-hosted tuist cloud?

To run the app on your device, you do need to re-sign it with your certificates. Note that our goal is to eventually push the app to the AppStore, so this will not be needed long term, but right now, the app is in very early development.

As for self-hosted, yes, the app will eventually support also the self-hosted Tuist server by letting you specify the server URL when authenticating.