All Articles
Apple's automated pass reads what your purpose strings are for, not whether they exist
Submit a Rork or Expo iOS build and you may get it back under Guideline 5.1.1 with a note about placeholder or otherwise insufficient purpose strings. Here is how to read a rejection that names no key, and how to rewrite the strings from app.json.
The three places I had to fix before a Rork project actually targeted API level 36
My app.json said targetSdkVersion 36. The value my build actually read was 35. Here is the script that reports the effective value, and how I split my apps between raising, leaving alone, and requesting an extension.
My chart broke on day one, not at scale
A line chart that vanished for anyone with only a few days of data. The cause was a zero-height Y axis turning coordinates into NaN. Here is the measured behavior and the small normalization layer that fixed it.
TestFlight External Testing or Phased Release: Where a Solo Developer's Time Actually Pays Off
When you ship a Rork-built app to other people, you can recruit external testers or let a phased release absorb the risk. Here is how I split my limited time between the two, based on where distribution actually stalls and which three areas still deserve pre-release checks.
Deciding overlay text legibility at ingest time instead of on device — four metrics measured side by side
Moving the question of whether text stays readable over a wallpaper out of the device and into the content pipeline. Four candidate metrics measured across 240 images, including what downscaled judging actually computes.
A JSON File 19% Smaller That Ships Only 3% Smaller — Measuring Catalog Payloads Against gzip
Five payload formats measured on a 20,000-item wallpaper catalog. Key shortening saves just 3.2% after gzip, while a columnar layout cuts 26.8%. Real numbers for Brotli, paging, and JSON.parse time.
When 1.10.0 Gets Locked Out: Measuring Four Version Comparison Approaches for Forced Updates
A remote-config gate for minimum supported version, rebuilt after measuring four version comparison approaches. Includes the cases where localeCompare reports equality, the fail-open boundary, and the incident caused by gating on a build still in review.
My generated wallpaper catalog hashed differently on every run — isolating five sources of nondeterminism
The same image folder refused to produce the same catalog.json twice. Directory enumeration order, JSON.stringify key reordering, collation, Unicode normalization, and async completion order — measured one at a time across 1,225 files until the output settled on a single hash.
The same wallpaper appeared twice in my catalog — measuring perceptual hash thresholds across 324 images
Four approaches to image catalog deduplication measured end to end: SHA-256, dHash, a hue signature, and a block signature. dHash alone scored 0.9% precision. Here is why perceptual hashes collapse on smooth images, and how the ground truth turned out to be the thing that was wrong.
Walk Through an App Store Submission Without Writing Code — Sticker Packs as a Dress Rehearsal
An iMessage sticker pack is one of the few things you can ship to the App Store with zero code. It cannot make money — and that constraint is exactly what makes it a clean rehearsal for the submission process.
Placing Native Ads in a Masonry Wallpaper Grid: Designing the Lifetime of an Ad Cell
One native ad in a masonry gallery pushed memory from 180 MB to 420 MB over twenty minutes of scrolling. Here is why cell recycling and ad object lifetime never line up, the pool-based implementation that fixed it, and how I picked the insertion interval from measured numbers.
Long-Press Context Menus for a Gallery Item in a Rork Expo App
Long-pressing a wallpaper card does nothing, yet iOS users expect a preview and a menu. From why Pressable alone falls short, to a native context menu with zeego, resolving the scroll-vs-long-press conflict, wiring up save and share, and a custom overlay fallback for Android — all with working code.