I Built an App During My Commute with the Kiro for iOS Beta
Using the Kiro for iOS beta during my commute, I guided an autonomous agent to build an IPv4 CIDR visualizer from my iPhone. I then added dark mode and a bilingual English/Japanese interface—all without opening my laptop.
Hi, I’m Kohei Otani from the AWS Group at ForgeVision.
I’m excited to publish my first post on AWS Builder Center.
As many of you may already know, it has been exactly one year since Kiro was introduced, and this week marked Kiro Birthday Week.
During AWS Summit Japan 2026 last month, Dave Brown announced Kiro for iOS. I immediately requested early access, but I did not hear anything for a while. Then, on July 10, I finally received the TestFlight invitation I had been waiting for.
TestFlight is required to test the app.
What Is Kiro for iOS?
Kiro for iOS is a native mobile app that connects directly to Kiro’s cloud-based agent sessions.
It allows you to start, monitor, and guide development sessions from your iPhone. You can also review changes and keep autonomous tasks moving without leaving a laptop running.
At the time of writing, the app is available as an invitation-only preview through TestFlight and requires an eligible paid Kiro plan.
Kiro App and Test Flight App.
Kiro Web provides browser-based development workflows, including Autonomous mode. You can give Kiro a goal, and its agent can plan the work, modify code in a connected repository, and prepare changes for review.
Kiro for iOS gives you a mobile interface for working with these cloud sessions from your iPhone.
Taking on the Daily Challenge
As mentioned earlier, this week was Kiro Birthday Week.
The celebration included livestreams and a series of daily coding challenges. I was busy with both work and community activities, but I found some time during my commute from home to Osaka Station to take on the Day 4 challenge:
Build one app with one sentence.
The trip takes just under an hour, so I decided to see how much I could build entirely from my phone during the journey.
Creating a GitHub Repository
I already knew that Kiro could work autonomously with a connected repository, so before leaving home, I created a public GitHub repository for the project.
Leaving Home...
As I left my apartment, I enabled Autonomous mode while waiting for the elevator and submitted the following one-line prompt:
Build a browser app that visualizes any IPv4 CIDR block and lets users split it into smaller subnets.
Arriving at My Local Station ...
By the time I arrived at Takatsuki Station, the development work was already complete.
I opened the app, reviewed the result, and published the
feature/cidr-visualizer branch using GitHub Pages.
IPv4 CIDR Block Visualizer -Done!
The previous week, I had spent a significant amount of time calculating CIDR ranges while working on route aggregation for AWS Transit Gateway. I had been thinking that a simple tool for quickly visualizing and calculating CIDR blocks would be useful.
Kiro had produced almost exactly the application I had imagined.
That was enough to complete the daily challenge, but while waiting for my train, I decided to send one more prompt—this time in Japanese:
Can you add dark mode and light mode?
<- I use English here in this post. :)
Arriving at Osaka Station ...
I took a nap during the approximately 25-minute train ride.
When I arrived at Osaka Station and opened the app, the task was complete. A toggle for switching between light and dark modes had been added at the top of the screen.
I was having fun, so I sent another one-line prompt in Japanese:
I would also like users to be able to switch the UI between Japanese and English.
<- I also use English here in this post. :)
Arriving at the Event Venue ...
After buying supplies, I arrived at the event venue about 20 minutes later.
I opened the app while riding the elevator, and once again, the development work was already complete.
The application now had
EN and JA buttons at the top of the screen, allowing users to switch between English and Japanese.My Experience
Building an application while traveling felt as though I were acting as the product owner and giving development instructions to an engineering companion through a chat interface on my iPhone.
For this experiment, I used a public repository, had Kiro create a feature branch, and updated the published page directly.
For a production workflow, I would use a more controlled CI/CD process:
- Ask Kiro to implement changes in a feature branch.
- Review the generated code and test results.
- Create a pull request.
- Run automated checks through CI.
- Merge and deploy only after approval.
I love AWS Amplify just as much as I love Kiro.
This type of workflow could make it possible to delegate development tasks from a phone while still maintaining appropriate review and deployment controls.
Conclusion
I love building things.
My usual approach is to start creating something before spending too much time thinking about it, and then refine the idea while looking at a working version.
The challenge with that approach is that producing the first working version still takes time. As a result, it can sometimes take longer than I would like to get started.
Kiro’s autonomous agent works particularly well with the way I like to build. It can quickly turn an idea into something tangible, allowing me to begin reviewing and improving the result much sooner.
Kiro for iOS currently requires an eligible paid Kiro plan and remains an invitation-only preview, so there are still some barriers to trying it.
However, once it becomes more widely available, I highly recommend experiencing what it is like to keep a development project moving directly from your phone.
Thank you for reading.
The views expressed in this article are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of ForgeVision or AWS.This article is an English adaptation of a post originally published on the ForgeVision Engineer Blog.
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