All Articles
When a Poisoned Cache Crashes Your App on Every Launch — Designing a Safe-Mode Boot Your Users Can Escape On Their Own
When a persisted cache goes bad and the app crashes at the same spot on every launch, the only option left to the user is to reinstall. This article designs a safe-mode boot for Expo (React Native): the app counts its own early crashes, confirms a launch only once it becomes interactive, and resets just the dangerous state in graduated steps.
Your Daily Reminder Stops Firing After a Couple of Weeks — iOS's Invisible 64-Notification Cap
When a daily reminder built with Rork (Expo) goes silent after a while, the cause is usually iOS's 64 pending-notification limit. Design a repeating calendar trigger for fixed messages and a rolling reschedule for daily-changing content, with working code that survives DST and multiple reminders.
Build a Toast System in Your Rork App That Survives Overlaps, Screen Readers, and Notches
When you add toast notifications to a React Native app generated by Rork, the naive version breaks in three places: two toasts overlap, screen readers stay silent, and the text hides under the notch or home indicator. This walks through a root-level queue, animations decoupled from your app tree, AccessibilityInfo announcements, and safe-area placement — all in working code.
Serving Both Plain Rork and Rork Max From One Backend — Designing an API Response Contract That Never Breaks Old Binaries
When plain Rork (React Native / Expo) and Rork Max (native Swift) both call the same Cloudflare Workers backend, the whole design centers on not breaking old binaries you cannot force-update. Wrap responses in an envelope, evolve them additively, absorb client differences with capability flags, and retire old contracts safely — shown in code.
A Wallpaper App's Real Work Starts After Launch — Content, Retention, and Revenue Notes from Running One on Rork
A wallpaper app is decided less by its launch and more by how you tend it afterward. Building on a Rork implementation, here are field notes on scheduled publishing that keeps content fresh, onboarding that survives the first week, and a revenue setup whose per-download return doesn't thin out over time.
Hardcoding Your OpenAI Key in a Rork (Expo) App Means It Gets Stolen — Slip a Thin Worker Proxy In Between
Embed an OpenAI or Gemini API key directly in the Expo app Rork generates and it can be extracted from the shipped binary. Here is why a key inside an app is never secret, plus a minimal Cloudflare Workers proxy that hides it (streaming passthrough included), simple abuse controls, and key rotation that needs no app review.
Your Rork App's Photos Look Sideways Only After Upload — Normalizing EXIF Orientation and Stripping Location Metadata
A photo that looks upright in your app rotates 90 degrees once it hits your server. The cause is the EXIF Orientation tag. Here's how to bake the rotation into pixels and strip location metadata with expo-image-manipulator before uploading.
Reclaiming the Pre-Submit Checks You Lose When Publishing Without Xcode
Rork Max's two-click publishing skips the Xcode Organizer, making it easy to miss usage strings, version bumps, and Bundle IDs. Here is a quick pre-submit self-audit you can run yourself, with how to read the generated files.
Your List Jumps Back to the Top — Restoring Scroll Position Across Back Navigation and Process Death
How I rebuilt scroll restoration for a wallpaper grid by splitting it into two unrelated problems — back navigation and process death — covering getItemLayout, save timing, and killing the restore flicker.
Your Notification Opens the App but Lands on Home — Routing Rork Apps by Launch State
How to make a notification tap reliably reach its target screen. We cover the three launch states — killed, background, foreground — and a pending-route design that never drops a tap that arrives before navigation is ready.
Where Should Your Rork App Store Auth Tokens? expo-secure-store and a Biometric Gate
How I moved a Rork-generated app's auth tokens out of AsyncStorage into expo-secure-store and put a biometric check in front of every read — including the size limit and sign-out gotchas I hit in production.
Add Long-Press Drag Reordering to Your Rork Favorites List Without the Jank
A practical walkthrough for retrofitting long-press drag reordering onto a Rork-generated favorites list: keeping re-renders down, respecting the worklet boundary, persisting the order, and avoiding ghost cards and scroll conflicts.