All Articles
Two Weeks After Adding Pangle and Mintegral to My AdMob Waterfall — Notes on eCPM and Fill Rate
A record from a wallpaper app with over 50 million downloads: I added Pangle and Mintegral to my AdMob mediation, then compared two weeks of eCPM and fill-rate data. Bidding-and-waterfall coexistence, the effective-revenue breakdown, region-based groups, and a daily monitoring script — kept in a form you can actually operate.
I Turned Off My AdMob Floors and Revenue Collapsed — The Mediation Rules That Actually Worked Solo
A record of tuning AdMob mediation eCPM floors to real-world rates on an indie wallpaper app, and handling the end of Unity Ads waterfall support. Why you must not turn INT floors off, the 80% match-rate boundary, and a twice-monthly review routine.
The Day I Walked Away From $730/Month — Pulling AppLovin From 5 Apps After 11 Years of Crash Data
On 2026-05-26 I paused AppLovin and AppLovinMax Bidding + Waterfall across my entire iOS/Android catalogue (50M+ cumulative downloads) for INT, RWD, and RWI. This is the full record of the three lines of evidence I used to justify walking away from $730/month and the four-week evaluation framework I set up afterwards.
How I Layered Rewarded, Interstitial, and App Open Ads to Lift ARPDAU 1.4× on My Wallpaper App
Optimizing AdMob's three formats individually hit a ceiling — they were eating each other's impressions. After redesigning Rewarded, Interstitial, and App Open as a coordinated 3-layer system with strict role separation and an exclusion gate, ARPDAU climbed 1.4× over nine weeks. The full playbook, code, and weekly numbers.
From a Rork-Built App to Monthly Break-Even at 100 Yen Subscription: Indie Numbers from May 2026
A small Rork-built utility app reached month-over-month break-even on a 100 yen subscription combined with AdMob. May 2026 numbers, decisions, and what I deliberately left out.
Minimal Customer Support Architecture for Solo Rork Devs — Running Inquiries for Multiple Apps Alone
The minimum-viable customer support stack I run as a solo developer maintaining a dozen apps with 50M cumulative downloads — in-app form with auto-attached diagnostics, Gmail filtering, reply templates, and the escalation rules that keep me under thirty minutes a day.
Designing AdMob App Open Ad Frequency Without Hurting Retention — Operational Notes from Wallpaper Apps
Implementation notes from rebuilding the AdMob App Open Ad frequency design in a recent wallpaper app update. Minimum intervals, cold-start exceptions, and post-modal suppression are controlled dynamically through Remote Config, with Claude in Chrome handling the daily dashboard review.
Three Months of Letting Claude in Chrome Help with App Store Review Replies
For most of my twelve years as an indie developer, App Store and Google Play review replies kept slipping to the bottom of the list. I spent three months letting Claude in Chrome help with the drafting, and the way I face one-star reviews changed in ways I didn't expect.
Putting AdMob Bidding into Production for a Rork App — Five Networks Bidding in Parallel, eCPM Trends, and Daily Operations
I moved the AdMob mediation layer of my Rork-generated apps from waterfall to bidding, with five ad networks bidding in parallel. Here are my real-world numbers after three weeks of production, the SDK pitfalls, and how I delegate daily monitoring to Claude in Chrome.
Two Months Without Opening AdMob Every Day — A Four-Tier Slack Setup for My Rork Apps
I have been shipping iOS and Android apps since 2014, and opening AdMob first thing in the morning had become a daily ritual. Earlier this spring I let it go and rebuilt the workflow around a four-tier Slack notification setup. Two months in, here is what I learned, including the misfires that took me three weeks to iron out.
The First 72 Hours After Shipping a Rork App — Crashes, Reviews, and Ad Priorities
The 72 hours right after you ship a Rork-generated app to the App Store or Google Play quietly decide most of the next six months of ratings and ranking. Here is the order I watch things in, after many years of solo iOS and Android releases.
Evaluating Rork Max SwiftUI Output After 12 Years of Native App Development
An honest review of Rork Max's SwiftUI generation quality from someone who has been shipping native wallpaper apps for 12 years and 50 million downloads. What worked, what didn't, and where I rewrote the code myself.