All Articles
When and How to Remove Features Nobody Uses — Auditing and Safely Retiring Functionality in Rork-Built Apps
Unused features quietly make an app harder to maintain. A field-tested playbook from running six wallpaper apps in parallel — how to measure feature usage, decide what to retire, and remove functionality in three safe stages with Remote Config.
Keeping a wallpaper app's binary small: moving images out of the bundle
Wallpaper apps bloat every time you add images. Here is where I draw the line between bundled and remote assets, how I keep first paint fast with prefetching, and the format work that cut transfer size to a third — with real numbers.
expo start --offline Says 'forbidden'? Corporate Proxy (403) vs Dependency Validation
Two different failures make 'expo start --offline' or EXPO_OFFLINE=1 die with 'forbidden': an HTTP 403 from a corporate proxy, and Expo CLI validateDependenciesVersions guard. How to tell them apart, when to set HTTP_PROXY to route through the proxy, and when to go fully offline with pre-generated caches instead.
How I Localized My Play Store Screenshots into 16 Languages — Swapping PSD Text with Python and Standardizing on Noto Fonts
An implementation log of localizing an Android wallpaper app's store screenshots into 16 languages: swapping PSD text layers per language with Python, auto-shrinking overflow, and assigning the right font per script — with the actual code and a font cheat sheet.
Unifying Onboarding Across Six Wallpaper Apps: What One Month of First-Day Retention Showed Me
I folded the onboarding flows of six wallpaper apps scaffolded with Rork into a single config-driven component and watched first-day retention and push opt-in for a month. Here is an honest, operational note on what moved and what didn't.
Fixing the 'Signed With the Wrong Key' Error When Uploading a Rork App to Google Play
Your Rork app builds fine but Google Play rejects the upload with 'signed with the wrong key'? Here's how to tell which signing key is involved and the exact steps to fix it for each build setup.
Retuning AdMob Mediation Priorities: Notes From Trying to Lift My eCPM
A running log of how I manually revisited the network priorities in my AdMob mediation setup to lift eCPM on an indie wallpaper app, what changed compared to leaving it on auto-optimization, and what I noticed along the way.
Getting Users All the Way to 'Set as Wallpaper' on iOS — Save-to-Photos Permissions and Shortcuts
iOS apps cannot set the wallpaper directly. Here is how I handle add-only photo permissions, Live Photo saving, guiding users to Settings, and Shortcuts automation, with real numbers from running six wallpaper apps.
Killing Thumbnail Scroll Jank in an iOS Wallpaper App — Notes on ImageIO Downsampling
Lay out a lot of thumbnails and scrolling stutters while memory balloons. The culprit was full-size image decoding on the main thread. Here is how ImageIO downsampling and prefetching cut measured memory dramatically.
Two Weeks of Maintenance After v2.1.0 — Running Crashlytics Triage Through Claude in Chrome
Notes from operating Beautiful 4K/HDR Wallpapers v2.1.0 and Ukiyo-e Wallpapers v1.8.0 through phased rollout. Defensive RecyclerView copies, Glide desugaring, drawable-nodpi placement, and what I now hand off to Claude in Chrome every morning.
Three Weeks of Syncing Release Notes Across Six Wallpaper Apps
Notes from three weeks of writing What's New entries for six wallpaper apps in the same week, with the same tone, using Rork as the source of truth.
Adding Slideshow and Page Jump to My Android Wallpaper Apps
Implementation notes from adding slideshow, a page-jump slider, and an ad-free option to the Android editions of Beautiful 4K/HDR Wallpapers and Ukiyo-e Wallpapers.