I have an app I tossed together in XCode, and it runs fine in the simulator. From what I can tell, it looks like I either need to re-distribute my app to my phone every 7 days, or get a paid account?
Am I understanding this correctly, or is there a “personal use workaround” that I’m not seeing?
Your understanding matches my understanding! (What’s the app?)
Yes, exactly. I thought Sparks raised a really good point recently on the pod that Apple should have a new tier of Apple developer account to allow distributing an app to just yourself or a very small group of users. This would help prevent clutter on the App Store too…
I was playing a Tetris-like game, and it not only had some mechanics that I really was not a fan of, but they wanted a subscription of $50 a year to play. So I found another one that I liked, only they absolutely won’t take my money – they want to flood me with ads all the time.
I looked at all of it and said, “I know I can throw together something that works better than any of this using Claude.”
Not something I care about distributing, but it is a fun test of using AI for a larger project. And it exactly scratches an itch that I have. 
If Apple does make me get a full-blown membership, it will likely end up in the store as donationware.
It might not make sense for the current project, since you’ve already built it, but if you don’t really care whether an app is native, you might consider having Claude help you build a web app.
I did that with a board game a family member enjoys, deployed it to Netlify, and added it to the Home Screen of relevant devices.
No cost involved, except for the time it took me to help Claude better understand the rules.
If it’s only for yourself you might also look at alternative stores.
You need a paid account.
It’d be nice if they made it easier to install on a single device or Apple account set of devices indefinitely. The Testflight experience for just you and your family is nice if you do pay, though. You can automate version bump and deployment to Testflight with something like Fastlane, and with an internal Testflight group, it doesn’t have to go through review.
I could always ask Claude to rewrite it.
I’m wondering if that makes sense though. When you did that with the board game app, does it have solid drag controls and animation and all that sort of thing? Or was it a more simple game?
It was a more simple game: Traverse. I set it up for only two players (human and computer) instead of the usual max of four. And I simplified the movement a bit, so that the human just moves their piece directly to any legal square, without showing the jumps that they would if playing with a physical board.
I kind of wish someone had made a real mobile version. It’d probably sell well. This one’s strictly for the personal use of the family member in question. My guess is there’d be a licensing issue if anyone tried to do this commercially.
Can confirm, that’s exactly how it works. One thing that tripped me up the first time: the $99/year program isn’t just for the App Store or TestFlight, it’s also what lets Gatekeeper trust an app you distribute completely outside the App Store. Without notarization, anyone else running it gets the “Apple could not verify this app” warning even if you hand them the binary directly. Once you’ve been through the archive, notarize, and staple steps once (Xcode Organizer can do it manually, or you script it with notarytool in a build step), it stops being scary and just becomes part of your release process. cornchip’s Fastlane suggestion is the right long-term move if you end up doing this more than a couple of times.