All Articles
Putting a Working Button in a Rork App's Widget — Implementing App Intents So a Tap Acts Without Opening the App
How to put a button in a Rork-generated Expo app's widget that changes state without launching the app. We wire App Intents and WidgetKit together through an App Group, all the way to reloadTimelines — including the two places I lost real time.
The Day a Third Reason to Hide Ads Appeared — Folding Rork App Ad-Free Logic Into One Place
Ads show only on one screen for paying users, or ads never show for free users. The usual cause is that the condition for hiding ads is scattered across the code. Here is how I fold three reasons — subscription, lifetime purchase, and a timed reward unlock — into a single state and route every ad through one hook, written as an implementation note from running six apps as an indie developer.
Making Rork App API Calls Survive Failure — Timeouts, Exponential Backoff, and Circuit Breakers That Actually Hold
A hands-on implementation log for hardening the API layer of a Rork-generated app. Add timeouts, exponential backoff, and a circuit breaker step by step so your app keeps working even when a dependency goes wobbly.
Stop Burning Your One Push-Permission Shot on App Launch — Pre-Prompt Priming for Rork Apps
If your Rork (Expo) app fires the OS push-permission dialog at launch, every 'Don't Allow' tap closes that channel forever — iOS won't let you ask again. Here's how a self-built pre-permission screen lifts your opt-in rate, with the Expo code to do it.
Actually Delivering 'It Updates Without Opening' in Expo — A Realistic Background Task Design
Building 'content refreshes every morning' into a Rork-generated Expo app runs into iOS background execution being far less dutiful than you expect. Here is a minimal expo-background-task setup plus a design that doesn't break when the task never runs.
Building Rork Subscriptions Around RevenueCat Entitlements — Access Checks, Offering-Driven Paywalls, and Restore
Implementation notes for adding subscriptions to a Rork (Expo) app with RevenueCat. Make Entitlements the single source of truth for access, drive the paywall from Offerings so you can change prices remotely, wire up restore and the customer-info listener, and avoid the sandbox traps — all with working code.
Reading Steps and Sleep into Your Rork Max Native App — HealthKit for Calm, Number-Light Wellness Apps
A walkthrough of adding HealthKit to the native Swift app Rork Max generates: reading steps, sleep, and heart rate, writing mindful sessions, and handling background delivery — including the App Store review wording and the production-only 'permission granted but zero data' trap.
Updating Live Activities Remotely: Putting Live Lock Screen Info on a Rork App
A practical design for updating Live Activities remotely through APNs so the Lock Screen and Dynamic Island stay current even when your app is closed. Covers push-to-start vs update tokens, the content-state payload, stale-date and the update budget, and bridging from Expo, with working code and the issues I hit in production.
When Your Rork App Gets ITMS-91053 — A Practical Guide to Privacy Manifests and Required Reason APIs
Submitting a Rork-generated Expo app to the App Store can trigger Privacy Manifest warnings even when you never wrote the offending code. Here is how to clear both Required Reason API and SDK manifest issues before you submit.
Before Your Feature Flags Turn Into a Junkyard — Governing Naming, Staged Rollout, and Kill Switches Across Six Apps
Keep adding remote-config flags and within six months you have keys nobody remembers the meaning of. Here is a governance system — naming conventions, safe defaults, staged rollout, kill switches, and monthly cleanup — with the implementation from running six apps in parallel.
Choose Native Features by Retention Impact, Not by Checklist
Rork Max can generate widgets, Live Activities, and Core ML alike. But 'can build' and 'should build' are different things. Here is how to decide native-feature adoption by its effect on retention.
You Only Get to Ask Once — Implementing a Notification Soft-Ask in Your Rork App to Lift Opt-In
On iOS, once a user denies the notification prompt you can never show it again. In a Rork (Expo) app, instead of firing the system prompt on launch, we add our own soft-ask screen and only request permission once the value has landed. Built with expo-notifications, covering Android 13 POST_NOTIFICATIONS, a recovery path after denial, and opt-in measurement.