Chinese pop star Hu Yanbin's self-coded fan community app, Yanhuo, is now live on the App Store.
Hu shared his development journey on Xiaohongshu (the lifestyle platform), revealing this is his first time building an app from scratch. He learned vibe coding from zero, piecing together and polishing the app step by step. The process was tortuous but deeply rewarding — "like beating a video game, or making music, with constant refinement." He said the goal was to create a dedicated space where fans can "talk and listen properly even across a screen." Hu plans to iterate based on user feedback.
The project had already gone viral in tech and developer circles for the novelty of a celebrity moonlighting as a programmer — including a story about him fixing a bug with Claude Code while on a business trip. Yanhuo is no rough experiment: it ships with dynamic sharing, performance schedules, private chat, a virtual growth system, and a custom AI assistant named Little Tiger, whose personality Hu personally designed.