How I made a paid Mac app in 11 days with Claude – without writing a single line of code

A ZDNET writer reports shipping a paid Mac app called Icon Gallery '97 using Anthropic's Claude tools without writing any code himself. He says he came up with the idea around noon on Sunday, Sept. 20, submitted the completed app to Apple on Sunday, Sept. 27, and that Apple accepted it four days later, after which it went live on the App Store.

The writer says he worked in both Claude Desktop, for strategy, and Claude Code, to build the app, and that he issued 502 individual directives over four days of active interaction. The app browses a library of 2,338 icons originally created for his 1990s product Icon Gallery, converted from a Macromedia Director file into more than 2,000 PNGs.

According to the account, Claude recommended naming the product Icon Gallery '97: 30th Anniversary Edition, adding icon recoloring, and creating collections and favorites. At a friend's suggestion he added an Export to Slack feature for emojis, and iCloud syncing was added as well.

The writer says Claude identified that the icons shipped as loose PNG files, allowing a free downloader to copy them via Show Package Contents, after which encryption was added and the app packaged as a single scrambled file that is unscrambled dynamically. Icons including a Caterpillar logo, a figure resembling Charlie Brown, and gunshot icons were removed over App Store review concerns.

He says creating App Store promo graphics took three days, almost as long as the app, because Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT produced unsatisfactory promo images, so he made them in Photoshop. He also says Apple rejected a 22nd TestFlight build on a Wednesday after 21 uploads that day, forcing a full-day wait that pushed the project back a day. He states he did not write one line of code.