All Articles
Why "Save to Photos" Fails on Only Some Devices in Your Rork App — expo-media-library Permission Scopes and Save Design
Your Rork app's image-saving feature works perfectly on your phone but fails for a subset of users. The real cause is expo-media-library permission scopes. Here is a save flow and album design that handles writeOnly permission, iOS limited access, and Android 14 partial access.
What to Decide Before Spreading One Idea Across Every Apple Platform
Rork Max can generate native Swift for iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Apple TV, and Vision Pro from a single idea. But 'can ship to all of them' and 'should ship to all of them' are different things. From an indie developer running several apps, here's a framework for choosing which devices to add and which to skip, reasoned backward from operating cost and usage context.
Why Your Rork List Starts Duplicating and Dropping Rows as It Grows — Cursor Pagination and Resilient Refetch State
The naive offset pagination Rork scaffolds for you quietly breaks the moment your list changes underneath the user. Here is how to move to a cursor contract, fold every fetch state into one usePaginatedList hook, and recover failed page loads with exponential backoff — implementation first.
Bugs Rork Can Fix vs. Bugs You Should Fix Yourself: A Triage Workflow for Exported Code
A practical triage workflow for telling apart the bugs Rork resolves on its own from the ones you should hand-fix in exported React Native/Expo code, with working examples.
Rork Max Credits Drain on Rework, Not Features — Where to Let AI Run and Where to Finish by Hand
Rork Max credit usage is driven less by how complex your app is and more by how many times you regenerate a screen. Here is a practical way to decide what to hand to AI and what to finish by hand, from an indie developer who ships to the stores solo.
Designing Rork Max Iterations So You Don't Burn Through Credits
Rork Max generates native Swift for you, but regenerating on impulse drains credits astonishingly fast. Estimate how many regenerations each screen will take, separate structural prompts from polish prompts, and draw a clear line for what to hand-edit instead. From an indie developer who ships to the store, here's how to treat credits as a budget.
Hardening API Calls in Rork Apps: Token Refresh, Retry, and Idempotency
The fetch Rork generates is left fragile against expired tokens, flaky signal, and double sends. Here is a design that consolidates token refresh, retry with backoff, and idempotency keys into a single client layer, with implementation code and operational numbers.
Rebuilding Rork's Generated Form Screens for Real Use: react-hook-form and zod
Rork's generated forms look fine on screen but fall apart on a real device: the whole screen re-renders on every keystroke, the keyboard hides the submit button, and slow networks invite double submits. Here is how I rebuild them with react-hook-form and zod, from an indie developer's point of view.
How to Write Prompts for Rork — Tips for Creating Apps Exactly As You Envision
Practical techniques for writing Rork prompts: specifying UI design, describing features, and requesting revisions so the app you get matches the app you imagined.
Logging Design for Rork Apps: What to Keep and How to Redact PII
Rork-generated apps tend to scatter console.log everywhere, and when a bug appears you cannot read the part that matters. This designs structured logging, log levels, automatic PII masking, and production send control — all with code you can use as-is.
When Rork-Built Lists Stutter: Designing Image Caching and Prefetch
A FlatList from Rork starts stuttering once the images pile up. Here is how I restore smoothness with expo-image caching, recyclingKey, prefetch, and a move to FlashList, with the device numbers I measured.
Before You Pay $200/mo for Rork Max, Map How Far Expo Reaches in Three Tiers
Wanting widgets or Live Activities makes Rork Max tempting, but most of those features are reachable from the Expo setup that standard Rork generates. Here is how I sort each Apple-native feature into three tiers—reachable in Expo, reachable with a custom module, or where Max is the pragmatic answer—and verify which tier my app is in before paying.