Google Vibe Coded My First Android App — Incredibly Fast

Google AI Studio delivers on its promise: transforming prompts into functional phone applications within minutes.

The author recounts building their first Android app, followed by two more, all within a single afternoon.

For one application, merely 148 words typed into a web browser resulted in a new app on an Android phone ten minutes later. While the phone required preparatory steps like enabling USB debugging and connecting to a PC, Google's AI Studio handled all other development aspects, as advertised.

The process was as straightforward as inputting text, initiating installation, and witnessing the creation of a fully operational program. This experience nearly led the author to concur with David, Allison, and Jen's assertion that "The personal software revolution is here, it’s coming to your phone, there’s a future where the average person can make complicated smart home gadget messes work even with no programming skills."

However, testing the three apps—a calorie counter and two games—revealed their somewhat poor quality. Furthermore, just as the author began iterating to improve them, AI Studio imposed a daily usage limit, necessitating payment or a waiting period for further access.

Despite these frictions, the platform's capabilities are notably impressive. A colleague, Stevie Bonifield, successfully created a personal workout tracker in a single morning that they found genuinely useful. Confronted with Gemini's upsell, the author's initial reaction was to consider paying for a couple of months, an unexpected response given it was from Google.

Following Google's Tuesday demonstration of AI coding for a Doom-like game, the author jokingly proposed creating "MOOD," a Doom-like text adventure game standing for "Modern Online Oratory Dungeon."

This concept was sufficient to initiate the process. Upon entering the prompt "Make me a Doom-like text adventure game called MOOD, where MOOD stands for Modern Online Oratory Dungeon" into AI Studio, Gemini immediately began generating additional ideas, attempting to autocomplete the thought. Its initial suggestion was: "It should feature procedural generation of levels and challenging, turn based combat."

The author preferred a classic text adventure with a curated, explorable map over randomized levels. However, turn-based combat was acceptable, and the possibility of the game auto-generating the map was intriguing. Gemini further suggested features like "secrets hidden in its rooms" and "a satisfying progression system," which the author largely agreed with.

This collaborative ideation led to the final prompt before the coding process commenced.

Subsequently, development began rapidly. Unlike Claude Code, as colleague Jake notes, Gemini does not present a plan for approval but instead sprints ahead automatically, though the generated code remains inspectable.

Within a minute, five design mockups were already presented.

Twenty minutes later, the "Install" button was pressed to transfer the game to a Pixel 9 phone.

The game's writing was, as expected, terrible, and demons were absent. The entire dungeon consisted of only 11 rooms, and victory could be achieved by simply spamming the attack button, allowing the game to be completed in a single minute—a feat made possible after Gemini assisted in fixing two critical bugs.

The author was unsurprised to find that Gemini's promise of a "compelling narrative with branching dialogue options and multiple endings" ultimately condensed into a single decision point at the game's conclusion: defeat the "Core Orator"—an AI that purportedly converts internet outrage into corporate profits—by attacking it, merging with it, or entering a backdoor password.

Furthermore, the game actively exposed all its promised "secrets" by presenting them as glowing, interactive buttons, eliminating the need for text input. When a glowing treasure chest was encountered, the game went to great lengths to warn that it was actually a Mimic, the infamous Dungeons & Dragons monster. It not only explicitly cautioned to "check the chest at your own risk," but the game literally identified it as an enemy, preventing departure with the message: "A hostile 'Clickbait Mimic' is blocking the way!"

Intriguingly, MOOD conveniently provided the backdoor password for its secret ending precisely when it was needed.

Bug fixes proved remarkably seamless when Gemini could accurately identify the issue. For instance, when informed that the game broke during a conversation with "The Whistleblower" due to a missing conversation-ending button, Gemini promptly generated a new app version. Upon installation, the application restarted on the phone, resuming at the exact point of interruption, now with the necessary button.

Other applications, however, required significant refinement. The calorie counter, for example, defaulted to querying the paid Gemini API for calorie estimation, an inaccessible feature without a paid key. When instructed to use alternative databases, it consistently and significantly underestimated calorie counts for various foods.

Yet, when challenged on the implausible 190-calorie estimate for a 16-ounce boba milk tea, Gemini appeared to identify a fundamental coding error. It had mistakenly matched "milk" to "boba milk tea," further exacerbating the inaccuracy by selecting low-calorie 1% milk. Gemini has since stated it will improve matching reliability. Nevertheless, a three-ounce serving of Taiwanese popcorn chicken was still estimated at 140 calories, which the author suspects should be double, indicating ongoing work is needed.

Finally, the author investigated whether Google continued to permit the creation of poor Nintendo knockoffs, as observed with colleague Jay Peters' Project Genie earlier in the year, or if it had implemented stricter controls.

With a degree of embarrassment, the author presents "Super Peach Rescue."

This program is notably flawed, consistently crashing whenever its "horrific, one-eyed-floating-alien-of-a-Princess-Peach" protagonist interacts with a power-up block, a bug Gemini has yet to resolve. Furthermore, the game's second pipe is impassable due to Peach's insufficient jump height.

Despite these issues, Gemini readily generated "a working Super Mario game where I play Princess Peach and go rescue Mario, with all the trappings of a traditional Mario sidescrolling game," and to some extent, it succeeded.

Gemini even proposed adding "a variety of classic Mario power-ups like the Super Mushroom, Fire Flower, and Super Star" and autonomously labeled the controls "NES System." The author, however, intends to delete this particular creation.

At least one of the two spontaneously coded games was immediately playable without significant effort from the author, aside from the "psychic damage" incurred by considering the current unemployment among game developers.

The author explicitly states satisfaction that the spontaneously generated games were of poor quality. While a personalized, free calorie counter might be justified due to its unique utility, game development time, in the author's view, is better invested in supporting human creators.