The story
Why it exists and what building it taught me. Written for the homepage card, kept here in full.
Why: When ChatGPT-4 first came out, it BLEW my mind. I was working with tons of medical documentation at Stryker and using it to learn fast, but their official app was slow, crashed, and limited me to 5 files at a time. I got curious about their API, saw people making wrappers, and thought, why would I pay for someone else’s app when I can just build my own?
File Formatting: OpenAI, at the time, would reject standard iPhone files (like live HEIC photos or RTF documents) when uploaded. To fix this, I set up a local conversion system that automatically turns these files into standard JPEGs and plain text on the device before sending them off.
“Is it done yet?”: Since OpenAI’s Assistants API didn’t respond instantly, I built a timer system that checks in with OpenAI every 2 seconds to see if the assistant is done thinking, so the app can display the answer the second it’s ready.
What I learned: Making an iOS app isn’t easy. I built it by copying OpenAI API references into text files, uploading them to a playground vector store for context, and copying and pasting the red errors back in to get corrected code. I repeated this until it worked, spent $99 on a developer account, and finally got it on the store after being rejected upwards of 30 times because they kept telling me everything that was wrong with my app.
Where it stands: Archived. The Assistants API it was built on is shut down now, which is the whole reason OpenResponses exists. It’s no longer on the App Store, and I’m not developing it further. Everything I learned getting this one approved went into the four apps after it.
