# I built an Android app with AI. Does that count as vibe coding? > Source: > Published: 2026-11-05 20:17:54+00:00 I'm a software developer who mainly codes for web applications. I have the technical expertise but lack the language knowledge to write a proper mobile application. With help from AI, here I am, shipping a manga reader + media vault in less than two months. I started this project mainly to solve two problems that I had: Occasionally, I have some manga downloaded as ZIP, JPG, PNG, and WebP, and I want to read them anywhere when I'm free. The manga reader apps I tried mainly catered to the online manga reading experience with no import functions. Even when they did have them, I couldn't configure them to show my offline manga on the main page. Furthermore, the manga are not private; they're still listed in my albums and media picker anyway. Then I saw media vaults. They work fine to keep my offline manga files private, but I couldn't use them as manga readers due to a lack of reading options and tagging functions. With the problems that I had and the software available out there, I tried to combine both app ideas into a single app that can function as a manga reader and media vault at the same time. The mobile application that I'm building is simply called "Organizer", and this is roughly how the app works. In each mobile application, there is app-managed storage that other installed mobile applications are not allowed to access. I simply build my app around this feature. The app allows users to import files into the app-managed storage with the option to remove the originals from external or shared storage after a successful import. Imported files can then be managed further by stashing them into folders and assigning tags to the media. With basic functions in place, I expanded the functions further by allowing users to import videos into the app. The paid edition also provides mandatory encryption combined with an app lock to make it more secure. At the time of writing, the Organizer app supports images, PDFs, ZIP/CBZ and RAR/CBR archives, and videos. I don't limit myself to a single LLM. I use various LLMs for various purposes. For this project, I mainly use ChatGPT's Codex to write the code and Google's Antigravity when I hit my ChatGPT limit. I quickly realised that without a proper prompt, AI code assistants can change a lot of lines of code in one prompt. If you are not careful with it, you will lose control very fast, and it is a hassle to write a proper prompt every single time. Hence, I established a workflow with the code assistant utilizing AGENTS.md. Here are the rules that I set. For each of my prompts for a code change, do the following: This means keeping related responsibilities together so I can find the part that I need to modify. With the rules above, here is how I wrote my prompts: Because the app's navigation is somewhat similar to a photo album, I quickly ran into some problems. In one of my test cases, I imported a massive amount of media into the app. When I scrolled through the list of media, the application's performance dropped, and the frame rate suffered. Simply asking the AI code assistant to fix it wouldn't work. This is where your intuition as a software developer comes into play. For the first few days, I couldn't fix it. None of the methods suggested by the AI code assistant worked. Then I noticed how other applications appeared to handle this: the media thumbnails seemed to load only when scrolling stopped for a few milliseconds. I quickly wrote out, step by step, how the app should handle media thumbnail loading when a scroll event is ongoing: And yes, it solved the performance issue in my app. AI code assistants have changed the way we code. Two months is actually not really fast considering how fast the AI completes a prompt. It was slow because this is my first time publishing an app on my own, and I had to research things outside the mobile development scope, such as setting up my developer account, setting up AdMob, finding a testing community, and so on. With all the technical prompts that I provided, is this still considered a vibe-coded app? It depends on who you ask. But nevertheless, AI coding is not going away. The app is currently available in the Google Play Store in two editions. One is free to use, and the other is a one-time purchase. Check it out and leave a review for me: What do you think? Would you call this vibe coding or AI-assisted development?