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The recommended replacement was already gone — auditing all 74 rows of Gemini's deprecation table
Cross-checking Gemini's deprecation table turned up five rows where the recommended replacement had itself already shut down, including gemini-2.5-flash-image, which goes away on October 2. Here is how to verify a migration target, and how to catch the 404 before your users do.
Where the AI decision lives once Rork splits your app into two native codebases
New Rork apps are Swift on iPhone and Kotlin on Android — two separate codebases. Here is how I decide which AI-related judgments stay in each client and which move to the shared backend, plus the minimal contract both clients read the same way.
Is That API Key Sitting Inside Your App? Rork Environment Variables vs. Supabase Edge Functions
Rork gives you two places to put an API key: its own environment variables, or a secret inside a Supabase Edge Function. Here is how I decide between them based on what I can revoke and who gets the bill, plus three checks to run after the key is in place.
Ask Rork for an iOS 27 feature and you may get last year's code back, with no error at all
iOS 27 ships on September 14. When a model is asked for an API it has never seen, there are two kinds of failure: the kind that stops your build, and the kind that does not. Here is why standard Rork and Rork Max differ, and the order I check generated code in.
Cutting MCP Tools Didn't Make Anything Lighter — 2,377 Bytes of Definitions vs 110,298 Bytes of Response
I wrote a minimal MCP server for a wallpaper catalog and measured the byte cost of tool definitions against the byte cost of responses. Here is which side actually matters, and the real reason to merge tools.
The Three-Minute Video That Kept Failing — Moving Rork's Gemini Uploads Off the Worker
How I rerouted video uploads to the Gemini Files API from a Cloudflare Workers relay to a direct device-to-Google path — why the 128MB isolate limit breaks the relay, how to hand out a resumable upload URL without leaking your API key, what Expo SDK 54 broke on the device side, and how the 20GB project ceiling and media resolution decide the bill.
On-Device Image Classification: TFLite on React Native or Core ML on Rork Max — How I Chose After Building Both
Adding on-device image classification means choosing between TFLite on React Native and Core ML on Rork Max. I built the same feature both ways, measured the end-to-end breakdown, and worked out what the decision actually hinges on.
When Your Finance App's AI Keeps Dumping Everything Into 'Other' — Field Notes on Catching Silent Classification Drift
An AI expense classifier in a Rork finance app can be accurate at launch and quietly decay over months until the monthly advice goes wrong. Here is how I instrumented confidence and category distribution to get ahead of the drift, with working code.
Integrating Image Playground in Rork Max Native Swift — Availability Design and Fallbacks for In-App Image Generation
How to build Image Playground into a Rork Max Swift app: availability checks with supportsImagePlayground, the imagePlaygroundSheet modifier, programmatic generation with ImageCreator, and fallback design for unsupported devices.
Long-Form On-Device Transcription with SpeechAnalyzer in Rork Max's Native Swift
Implementation notes on rebuilding long-form, offline transcription with iOS 26's SpeechAnalyzer and SpeechTranscriber after hitting the walls of SFSpeechRecognizer. Covers model asset downloads, feeding audio through an AsyncStream, drawing volatile vs. final results, and the boundary design for Rork Max native code and bridging from Expo — with the pitfalls I actually hit.
When Your Rork Hybrid AI Quietly Drifts to the Cloud and the Bill Creeps Up — Field Notes on Instrumenting Routing Decisions
A router that splits work across on-device, edge, and cloud layers will quietly drift toward the cloud when no one logs its decisions — flat traffic, rising bill. These are field notes on instrumenting routing to isolate the cause.
Monetizing a Rork-Built App — Choosing Between Ads, Subscriptions, and Freemium
How to monetize an app built with Rork — from choosing between ads, subscriptions, freemium, and one-time purchase to the implementation details. Phased AdMob formats, treating ad-free as a single source of truth, and price anchoring, written from the indie-developer trenches.