Make it

  5 min read

Your app's MCP server now speaks the latest version of the protocol

Every GoodBarber app comes with its own MCP server. It is the secure doorway that lets an AI assistant, with your permission, read and manage your app: write and schedule articles, update products, check your stats, prepare push notifications. You connect the assistant once, it authenticates through OAuth, and it only ever sees your app.If you are discovering this, two good starting points: our MCP page explains how to connect an assistant to your app, and this article explains what makes an application MCP server different.

  15 min read

The production checklist AI-built apps fail (7 things that break after the demo)

The short version. An AI-built app that shines in a demo has proven it can render, not that it can run. Production is decided by seven boring things: accounts, empty states, store review, push delivery, the stack bill, the first update, and week-to-week operation. Run the seven checks below before you announce a launch date. On GoodBarber, the platform carries the first six, some pre-built, some as a service, and the seventh comes with an AI agent connection.You built an app with an AI app builder, or vibe-coded it prompt by prompt over a few evenings. It works. But look at the conditions under which it works: your phone, your Wi-Fi, your account, data you typed in yourself, a build generated an hour ago. A demo is an app tested exclusively under friendly conditions.Production ready means the opposite: the app keeps working once the friendly conditions are gone. Strangers instead of you, a reviewer instead of an audience, months instead of an afternoon.We have already written about why this gap exists: our article on the seven walls between a prototype and the stores maps the structural distance, and our piece on building an app versus running one names the work that starts after launch. Those articles end in questions worth asking yourself. This one turns the questions into experiments: seven checks, each with a concrete procedure and a pass condition you cannot argue with, all of them runnable this week. If a check feels boring, that is the point. Production is where the boring bugs live.

  3 min read

New Classic Themes to Launch Your App Faster

The hardest part of a content app is rarely the content. It is making everything look intentional, screen after screen, when design is not your job. A theme solves that by handing you a complete visual direction: colors, typography, imagery style, and layout already working together. You bring your content and your brand; the theme brings the polish. And because every theme runs on Smart Design, the result stays consistent however far you customize it.

  8 min read

Will your app still work in three years?

What happens to an app in the three years after launch: what moves around it, what the platform absorbs on your behalf, and the short list of what stays in your name.

  13 min read

GoodBarber vs Replit

Replit has been building browser-based development tools since 2016. In early 2026 it added a mobile offer, under a page titled "Idea to Mobile App in Minutes" — which puts it, for the first time, on the same ground as an app builder.So we ran our standard brief through it — AURORA, the same luxury travel guide app we build on every tool in this series. Not a feature checklist: an actual app that has to reach the stores, get updated every week, and be operated by someone who does not write code.What comes out of Replit is real. It is also, unmistakably, a codebase — a React Native project, a metered cloud, and a development console. That is the whole comparison in one sentence: Replit answers you in plain language, then hands you something that behaves like an engineering project. Whether that is a gift or a problem depends entirely on who is going to run the app next Tuesday.

  5 min read

IndexNow on GoodBarber: get your PWA indexed faster

The SEO of a PWA rests on a simple principle: for a page to show up in search results, an engine first has to visit it, read it, and index it. That visit — the crawl — isn't something you trigger. The engine decides when it comes back, at its own pace.For a static site, that wait barely matters. For an app whose content is alive — a media outlet publishing several times a day, a store whose prices and stock keep shifting, a schedule where events appear and expire — it's a genuine drag. You've already done the work: the content is live, up to date, ready to be found. But it sits there waiting on a crawler that hasn't come back yet. In the meantime, it's sometimes an old version of the page — or nothing at all — that surfaces in results.

  6 min read

AI Extension Builder: custom article templates for your app

Name any content section of your app in your prompt, and the AI Extension Builder builds a section that displays that content — in the exact layout you described. Your articles, your template, always up to date. Every content section in a GoodBarber app comes with a set of carefully designed templates. You pick one, and it works — that's the point of an integrated platform. But the layout you have in mind isn't always in the list. Maybe you picture your latest articles magazine-style: one big cover photo with the title overlaid, smaller cards underneath. Or your events as a compact agenda with just the date and the venue. Until now, you picked the template that came closest.What many AI Extension Builder users haven't discovered is that this limit is gone. The builder doesn't just create standalone widgets — it can read the content of your app's existing sections. Which turns it into something more interesting than a widget generator: a tool for designing your own display templates.

  6 min read

Read, cite, train: decide what AI does with your content

If you've published your PWA, it's serving a robots.txt right now — the first thing any crawler reads, and the file that decides what happens next: which parts of your site get fetched, and by whom. Yours has been saying yes to everyone.Everything below concerns that web version of your app. Your iOS and Android apps aren't crawled by anyone, and the tab only appears once your PWA has been published at least once — before that, there's no file to configure.That was a defensible answer. It just wasn't one you made — and the population it answers has changed. A few years ago, a crawler on your content was Google, Bing, or a scraper you didn't care about. Today a growing share of that traffic belongs to AI companies, and they don't all want the same thing from your pages. Treating them as one block means choosing between all of them and none of them.The new tab splits them into four families, in plain language: search engines (Google, Bing and the others that list your site in their results), AI answers (ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity citing your site when they answer), AI training (robots collecting your content to train their models), and on-demand reading (someone asks an AI to open one specific page of your site). Four families, because those are four different deals.

  10 min read

What quietly breaks when you don't update your app (and why you never notice on GoodBarber)

The short version. A mobile app that is not updated does not stay frozen: it decays. Push notifications quietly stop landing, new users stop finding it, and the stores eventually hide or remove it. On GoodBarber, the platform absorbs every OS and store change and ships the fix with your next update, so a year of mobile churn reaches you as a release note. The one thing you still have to do: update regularly.Your app works today. Leave it untouched for a year: it will still open, still look right, still do its job on your own phone. Nothing in your dashboard warns you. That is the trap.Because while your app stood still, everything underneath it moved. Apple and Google shipped new operating systems, rewrote store rules, retired old plumbing. You notice months later, through symptoms that look like a marketing problem: downloads sag, push campaigns reach fewer people, a loyal user writes that the app misbehaves on their new phone. The decay is real, and it has nothing to do with the quality of your content.

  7 min read

Prompt teardown: GPS, memory, and Maps from a single sentence

Nobody doubts anymore that an AI can generate capable code — even "vibe-coded," it works, sometimes very well. That's not the interesting question. The interesting question is: once it's generated, what does that section actually do inside your app? Does it sit in a corner as an isolated block, or does it use what the phone and the app already know how to do? The most honest way to answer is to take a prompt and pull it apart, line by line.That's what this series is for. In each episode, we'll take one prompt from the AI Extension Builder's library and pull it apart: where it trusts the platform, where it overrides it, and what the resulting section can really do. First up, one of the library's example prompts: "where did I park?"Here's the shortest prompt you could write for this:Build a "remember where I parked" helper.That's it. One sentence, not a spec. And here's what comes out:A button to save your location. A section that finds that spot again when you reopen the app. A button to head back to the car. A discreet link to clear it. And if you decline location access, a screen that explains it instead of crashing.The surprise isn't that seven words draw a screen. It's that this section, born from one sentence, already reaches the device: it reads the GPS, it keeps a memory, it opens Maps. We asked for none of those three things.

  7 min read

App Store publishing: everything you asked at our Reddit AMA

We hosted a live AMA on r/GoodBarber, opening the floor to any question about publishing an app on the App Store — App Review, App Store Connect, developer accounts, all of it. The answers came directly from the support team that handles App Store and Google Play submissions every day, with iOS engineers pulled in whenever a question got technical. Here's the recap. We get this question a lot, so we looked at our own support cases from the last 18 months. The most common rejection reasons are less dramatic than people expect:Incomplete or inaccurate App Store metadata — missing or misleading information, screenshots, descriptions.An incorrectly configured App Privacy form.Apps that Apple considers incomplete or not fully functional during review.Beyond that, we regularly see rejections tied to content rights (especially audio or video), apps in regulated industries that don't meet Apple's expectations, or apps judged too close to something that already exists.For a first-time submission, it starts with the metadata: highlight your app's real value instead of generic promotion, and follow Apple's guidelines — they're the baseline for everything else. And if you do get rejected, don't panic. A rejection isn't a dead end, it's usually just part of the process. Read Apple's feedback carefully, address each point, and resubmit — we've seen plenty of apps get approved after one, or several, rounds of review.If you're convinced a reviewer got it wrong, stay factual. Explain clearly why you believe your app complies with the guideline in question, and back it up with whatever helps — screenshots, a screen recording, test credentials, step-by-step instructions if a feature isn't obvious. If the discussion stalls, you can request a call with an Apple representative through the App Resolution Center in App Store Connect — a direct conversation often clears up misunderstandings faster than a written back-and-forth. As a last resort, you can appeal to the App Review Board, where a senior member of Apple's team reviews the case. Either way, the goal isn't to prove Apple wrong — it's to make it as easy as possible for the reviewer to see why your app complies.

  17 min read

Vibe coding is magic in the demo. Is your app really production-ready?

On February 2, 2025, Andrej Karpathy named the thing: “There's a new kind of coding I call 'vibe coding', where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists.” Nine months later, “vibe coding” was Collins Dictionary's Word of the Year. Few tech terms have traveled that fast — because few tech experiences are that intoxicating.The numbers say the same. Lovable reached $100M in annual recurring revenue eight months after launch, with more than 10 million projects created on the platform. Bolt.new reached roughly $40M ARR in about five months. Replit multiplied its revenue tenfold in half a year after launching its agent. Millions of people typed a sentence and watched software appear.We understand the high. It's the same one our users feel when they describe a feature and see it running in their app. Seeing your idea work — not mocked up, working — changes what you believe you can build. That part deserves no irony.But Karpathy put the caveat in the very same post: vibe coding is “not too bad for throwaway weekend projects.” The people living it say it with less restraint. One builder on r/nocode titled his post “Tried Bolt.new. Felt Like a God. Then Reality Slapped Me.” and summed up the morning after: “Suddenly, the dream of 'AI-powered coding' turned into 'AI-powered anxiety.'”The demo isn't a lie. The mistake is reading it as a finished product.

  9 min read

Can a no-code app builder make Flappy Bird? I tried.

A video game isn't what you'd expect from an app builder.That's exactly what makes it a good test. To find out what the AI Extension Builder is really capable of, you're better off asking it for the improbable than for one more section. So we described a full arcade game — finger-tappable, full-screen, a leaderboard shared across every player — and watched to see how far it would hold up.It held up. The lesson isn't “go publish games,” it's “the ceiling is far higher than you think”: what's true for a Flappy Bird is true for the sharp, specific feature your app actually needs. Everything was described in plain language, in a few paragraphs. Here's the result.

  4 min read

What's New at GoodBarber? June 2026

This month's updates focus on visibility, compliance, and user experience — new ways to highlight key actions, protect younger users, and smooth out everyday interactions in your app. Here's what's new: New global Floating Button: highlight a key action across your whole app, configured once from the Structure panel. Age Protection: a new feature to comply with regional age-verification laws and automatically protect younger users. Event map thumbnails: events shown on a map can now appear as their own thumbnail image instead of a standard pin, so each one is instantly recognizable. Show/hide password: your users can now tap the eye icon to show or hide their password on any login or sign-up screen, so a typo never blocks them again.