One thing I’ve never been able to find is the perfect meditation app on my iPhone. All I need is a timer that counts down from 10 minutes, which is my preferred session time, and looks nice, but I just can’t find an app I like that does that.
The free apps I’ve tried either didn’t look right, had too many confusing features, or were full of ads that try to get you to upgrade to extra functions after 30 days.
I’ve ended up resorting to using the Timer function in the basic iOS Clock app from Apple. That works OK, but it doesn’t give off the vibes I’m looking for, and it doesn't have any additional features. It’s also a bit fiddly to use.
Maybe AI can help?
That’s when I thought that if you can’t find the app you want, then these days there’s nothing to stop you just making your own using AI. So why not?
A bit of research led me to the conclusion that Google’s AI Studio was the tool I needed for this, so I fired up my MacBook, headed over there, and clicked the Get Started button once it had loaded.
You’re initially presented with an empty prompt box, just like you would be in Gemini or any other AI chatbot. So, I started to type.
“I want a meditation app timer that will count down from 10 minutes when I press a button. It will have soothing graphics and play mellow beats when it counts down”, and then I noticed that Google was adding suggestions into the prompt for me.
It suggested, "and allow users to customize the background soundscapes and session duration settings.” That wasn’t a bad idea at all, so I accepted the suggestion.
AI Studio started to think about its task, and in just 38 seconds it had come back with a design preview for me to accept or change. Its initial immersive UI design looked perfect, so I accepted that.
The next thing it showed me was the actual finished app, and it looked great! It had everything I wanted — beautiful calming design, an obvious button to press, a session time selector, and it played chill beats during the session. But it had also added a lot of really useful options, like soothing theme choices, a lead-in time selector, a paced breathing guide, and interval chime bells. And all in a non-intrusive way that kept the app's core functionality simple. I was impressed.
The whole thing had taken just 238 seconds to produce. That’s under 5 minutes.
Deploying your app
The question now was: how to get the app from existing inside AI Studio and onto my iPhone? That is where I wanted to run it, not on my MacBook. That’s what the Publish button in AI Studio is for. It publishes your app to a unique website address. It’s public, so you can go there now and use my app yourself, if you like.
One option for running the app on my iPhone was to simply click on the URL in the iPhone’s web browser. Interestingly, it worked in the iOS Chrome browser, but not in the native Safari browser. Further research revealed that the reason for this was Safari’s default third-party cookie block. Safari blocks third-party cookies by default via Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP).
It turns out that this is pretty easy to fix; just go to your iPhone Settings > Apps > Safari. Turn off the toggle for Prevent Cross-Site Tracking.
I did that, and now my app ran fine in Safari as well as Chrome.
I could make a bookmark for my app and continue to run it in my iPhone’s browser if I wanted, but it’s much better to choose the ‘Add to Home Screen’ option because this makes your app feel much more like a stand-alone app on your iPhone. It runs it without any of the browser furniture on screen at all.
To do this, choose the three-dot menu in Safari > Share > Add to Home Screen. Now you’ve got a new icon on your iPhone.
An app I’ll use every day
My meditation timer app has quickly become something I use every day and has earned a coveted place on the first page of my Home Screen. But it’s just one possible application of using AI Studio — whatever app you want, you can build it easily.
Google’s AI Studio means that you can go from “I wish there was an app that did X” to “I’ll just build one” in seconds. You don’t need to learn how to code, and you don’t need to have really any skills, just the ability to write a description of what you want your app to do. And AI Studio will even help you with that.
The result isn’t going to replace the App Store. It’s a web app rather than a polished native iPhone app, and there are still limits to what you can build without coding knowledge. But for small, personal tools like this, that hardly matters. I didn’t need millions of downloads, regular updates, or a business model. I just needed one app that worked exactly the way I wanted it to.
That might be the most exciting thing about AI app builders. For years, when an app was almost right, you either tolerated its flaws or kept searching for another one. Now there’s a third option: describe the missing app, build it yourself and put it on your Home Screen before you’ve even finished complaining about it.
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