November 25, 2025
Liquid Glass, fragile feelings
How we built the v0 iOS app
Vercel drops an iPhone AI chat—pretty vibes, devs divided, some ask what it does
TLDR: Vercel released v0, an iOS AI chat app designed to feel ultra‑native with React Native and fancy animations. The crowd is split: some praise the slick Liquid Glass design, others slam the tech choice and vague messaging, asking why the AI part isn’t clearer. This matters for mobile app strategy debates.
Vercel just launched its first iPhone app, v0, and it’s all about making ideas with AI when you’re away from your laptop. They chased that Apple Design Award shine, iterated like crazy, and ultimately chose React Native (web-style tools for building apps) with Expo to make it feel super iPhone-y. The star is a silky chat: messages glide, fade, and stack with a “Liquid Glass” composer floating like a sci‑fi bubble. It’s not a full mobile coding tool; more like a souped‑up Notes that builds things in the background. Read the breakdown on the Vercel blog.
But the comments? Absolute popcorn. One camp argues the tech choice is a red flag: “React Native isn’t the way forward” and making it “look native” is brittle, says @_fzslm, sparking a classic “pretty UI vs. long‑term reliability” brawl. On the other side, @tevon is vibing hard with Liquid Glass: “perfect use-case… really enjoying this new UI.” Then @gitpusher drops the confusion bomb: “Cool animations… but what does it do?”—calling out the mysterious landing page that hides the AI angle until you hit the App Store. Bonus drama: the author (@fernandorojo) parachutes into the thread offering answers, which only fuels the “is this Notes with vibes or iMessage cosplaying an IDE?” memes. It’s aesthetics vs clarity, cross‑platform vs native, and everyone has feelings—some glassy, some fragile.
Key Points
- •Vercel built v0 for iOS and chose React Native with Expo after extensive prototyping to achieve a native-feeling app.
- •The app focuses on on-the-go AI-assisted creation via a chat interface, not full mobile IDE parity.
- •The team defined specific chat requirements, including smooth/staggered animations, a Liquid Glass composer, robust keyboard handling, media pasting, pan gestures, and fast Markdown with dynamic components.
- •The chat architecture is composable per feature, using context providers, hooks, and open-source libraries like LegendList, React Native Reanimated, and React Native Keyboard Controller.
- •Animations are driven by Reanimated shared values and React Native’s New Architecture for synchronous measurement, computing translateY and opacity from message, window, and keyboard sizes.