Google product manager asks Apple to open iPhones to private personal apps
Dmitry Lyalin says AI has made small apps cheap to build, while Apple's distribution system still treats every creator like a publisher.
By Ryan Merket · Published
Why it matters
AI coding is shifting the bottleneck from writing software to safely distributing it. Apple risks pushing personal micro-apps to the web unless iOS gains a durable private-sharing tier.
Dmitry Lyalin (@LyalinDotCom), the Google product manager who leads Gemini CLI, asked Apple on July 28th to create a secure way for people to install and update private iPhone apps made for family members and small groups.
Lyalin's argument starts with a change in who can make software. AI coding tools have lowered the cost of producing a simple app enough that a parent can build a game for one child, a utility for a spouse or a shared tool for four friends. Those apps may have no market beyond the people for whom they were made.
Apple's distribution system has no durable tier designed for that use case in the US. A free Apple developer account lets a creator install an app on a personal device, but Apple's documentation says the provisioning profile expires after seven days. Free accounts are also limited to 10 app IDs and three registered devices, with those registrations expiring on the same schedule. The creator must rebuild and reinstall the app after the profile expires.
"It's not a personal app tier," Lyalin wrote. "It's a development tier with a seven-day clock on it."
Lyalin joined Google in 2022 after 14 years at Microsoft, where he worked on products including .NET MAUI, .NET Hot Reload, Visual Studio XAML tooling and Azure DevOps, according to his personal site. He previously led Firebase Serverless and Genkit at Google. He made clear that his Apple proposal was personal and did not represent Google or Android.
That distinction matters because Google is already pushing toward the software model Lyalin described. In May, Google added native Android app generation to Google AI Studio, letting users prompt the service to produce Kotlin and Jetpack Compose code, run the result in a browser emulator and install it through Android Debug Bridge.
AI Studio can also package an app and upload it to a Google Play internal testing track. Google said creators can automatically update the app on their own devices as they continue editing it. Inviting other testers directly from AI Studio was still listed as coming soon in Google's May 19th announcement.
The result is an emerging split between app creation and app distribution. Model providers and coding startups are competing to reduce the work between a prompt and functioning software. Apple still requires creators to choose among workflows built for development, beta testing, registered test devices or App Store publication.
Apple's existing routes expire or require administration
Joining the Apple Developer Program costs $99 per membership year and opens several distribution paths. None matches the low-administration family-and-friends channel Lyalin proposed.
TestFlight supports up to 10,000 external testers, and those users do not need access to the developer's App Store Connect account. But TestFlight builds expire after 90 days, and the first build added for external testing must go through TestFlight App Review. Internal testing avoids that external-review workflow, but it is limited to 100 App Store Connect users who have access to the developer's content.
Ad Hoc distribution lets developers install apps outside TestFlight on registered hardware. Apple requires the creator to collect each device's identifier and add it to the developer account. The program allows up to 100 devices per product family per membership year. Disabling a device during the year does not restore the slot; the available count resets at the start of a new membership year.
Apple also offers unlisted App Store distribution, which keeps an app out of search results, rankings and recommendations while making it available through a direct link. That route still requires a release-ready app to be submitted for App Review. Anyone who obtains the link can reach the listing, so Apple advises developers to add their own access controls when necessary.
Custom apps distributed through Apple Business Manager or Apple School Manager address private organizational deployments. Those systems presume a business, school or managed-device program rather than a person sharing an app with a spouse.
Lyalin proposed building on systems Apple already operates, including Family Sharing, TestFlight and device management. A creator could maintain a small private catalog, control membership, send updates and revoke access without presenting the app as a beta or public product.
Security remains the reason Apple's gates exist. A private distribution channel could become a route for malware, fraud or efforts to bypass App Review if Apple made it easy to invite strangers at scale. Lyalin argued that Apple should keep tight limits and controls while recognizing a distinct category between a developer's own test device and public software distribution.
The timing follows the spread of AI tools that can produce small, specialized applications faster than platform distribution rules were designed to accommodate. Apple can leave those projects on the web, where sending a link remains the simplest deployment method. A native personal-app tier would keep more of that software, and the activity around it, inside iOS.