My 5 Best Skills for iOS Development with AI

Building an iOS app that feels truly native is hard. And by default, AI doesn't get it right. It gives you generic UI, missing all the small details that make an app feel native.

The fix? Skills. You install the right context once, and your AI agent stops guessing.

Here are the 5 skills I use to build native iOS apps with AI. You'll find every link and install command below.

1. Building Native UI (Expo team)

This is one of my favorites. It gives Claude deep context on how to create modern, polished native UI.

It covers:

• liquid glass (the new material effect in iOS 26)
• the latest Expo Router APIs
• Expo Symbols, controls, and animations
• all the best practices that agents miss all the time

If you're building with Expo and want your app to feel truly native on iOS 26, this skill makes a massive difference.

npx skills add https://github.com/expo/skills --skill building-native-ui

2. React Native Skills (Vercel team)

This skill brings the Vercel team's expertise directly into Claude.

The focus:

• performance
• animation best practices
• UI patterns that make a high impact on your codebase

It's the kind of skill you don't notice right away, but it changes the underlying quality of your code. You ship faster, but more importantly you ship better.

npx skills add https://github.com/vercel-labs/agent-skills --skill vercel-react-native-skills

3. Make Interface Feel Better

The third one is Make Interface Feel Better.

This one plays on the details. Where the others lay the foundations, this one takes an already-decent interface and makes it beautiful:

• perfect borders
• polished animations
• numbers that render cleanly (tabular numbers) instead of jumping around
• tons of micro-polish details

This is exactly the kind of detail that separates an average app from one that feels delightful. On mobile, where every pixel counts, it matters even more.

npx skills add jakubkrehel/make-interfaces-feel-better --skill make-interfaces-feel-better

4. App Icon (my skill)

The fourth one is one of my own skills: App Icon.

It generates a premium, vibrant, dimensional app icon for your Expo / React Native app using AI, then post-processes it to App Store and Play Store specs.

The goal isn't a flat, dull pictogram. It's a real "featured" icon: a glossy 3D hero, gradients, studio lighting, all on a vivid full-bleed background. The kind of icon that makes people want to tap.

Best part: it works with any image-generation tool (Codex image_gen, gemini-cli Nano Banana, gpt-image...).

npx skills@latest add melvynx/aiblueprint --skill app-icon

More details in the documentation.

5. App Store Connect (my skill)

The fifth one is also one of my skills: App Store Connect.

It drives all of App Store Connect through the asc CLI: apps, builds, TestFlight, beta testers, reviews, sales, metadata, in-app purchases, signing, submissions.

And most importantly, it handles the most painful manual step: it builds your Expo / React Native iOS app and ships it to TestFlight in one command (appstore-connect testflight). API-key signing to avoid Apple 2FA, local or cloud build, then publish. That's exactly where you usually lose a ton of time, and it takes care of it.

npx skills@latest add melvynx/aiblueprint --skill appstore-connect

More details in the documentation.

How I combine them

Here's the general idea for an iOS app with Expo:

You don't need all of them every time. But Building Native UI alone completely changes how your Expo apps look on iOS 26.

Going further

If you want to learn how to build mobile apps from scratch with AI, I put together 3 free skills to automate your mobile applications: mlv.sh/fm.

Now go install these skills and run them on your project. The difference becomes obvious the moment you test them on your own code. 🚀