All Articles
Design the Exit Before You Commit to a No-Code Mobile Platform
When you build an app business on a no-code tool, the first thing to plan is not the features but whether you can ever leave. Here is how to weigh lock-in risk for Rork and Rork Max from a portability standpoint.
Shipping Wallpaper Packs Without an App Review — Versioning and Delta Delivery for Remote Assets Across Six Apps
Re-submitting your app every time you add ten wallpapers grinds operations to a halt. Here is a manifest-based versioning scheme with delta downloads, cache invalidation, and rollback — with the implementation and measured transfer savings from running six apps in parallel.
Raising Your Subscription Price: How to Handle Existing Subscribers on the App Store and Google Play
Raise your subscription price without losing existing subscribers: break-even churn math, store consent flows, PRICE_INCREASE and EXPIRED handling, and cohort tracking.
Keeping a Rork-Built Expo App Ready for Kotlin Migration — Design Notes After Android Studio's Migration Agent Announcement
Android Studio's new agent can migrate React Native apps to native Kotlin. Here is how I restructured a Rork-built Expo app to stay migration-ready: a native dependency audit script, a portable core layer pattern, and a readiness checklist.
When and How to Remove Features Nobody Uses — Auditing and Safely Retiring Functionality in Rork-Built Apps
Unused features quietly make an app harder to maintain. A field-tested playbook from running six wallpaper apps in parallel — how to measure feature usage, decide what to retire, and remove functionality in three safe stages with Remote Config.
When Hiragana Doesn't Match Katakana — Japanese-Aware In-App Search for Rork Apps
A hiragana query silently missing katakana titles is a UX failure users never report. How I fixed Japanese search in my wallpaper app with NFKC normalization, kana folding, and precomputed search keys.
A Three-Layer AI Cost Design for Rork Apps After Apple Opened Foundation Models to Small Developers
Apple now offers Foundation Models on Private Cloud Compute at no charge for developers under two million first downloads. Here is a three-layer cost architecture for Rork apps, with a simulation script and working bridge code.
Keeping Manual Fixes Alive Across Rork Regenerations — Boundary Design for AI-Owned Code
A tiny copy-change request quietly reverted my week-old ATT fix. Here is the boundary architecture I use now: a guarded directory, one-line adapters, patch assets, and scoped prompts — with measured blast-radius numbers.
Android 17 Will Ignore Your Portrait Lock — Getting Rork-Built Expo Apps Ready for Large Screens Ahead of Time
Android 17 stops honoring orientation locks and resizability restrictions on large-screen devices. Here is how I assessed the impact on my Rork-built Expo apps, reworked the layouts, and verified everything with nothing but an emulator.
Your Rork App's 'Documents & Data' Keeps Growing — Taming expo-image's Disk Cache
My wallpaper app's binary was 40 MB, yet 'Documents & Data' had ballooned to 2.4 GB. Here is how I diagnosed expo-image's unbounded disk cache and fixed it with cachePolicy tuning, thumbnail URLs, and generational cache clearing.
Rork Lab This Week: Apple's Free Foundation Models, and Knowing When to Go Deeper
Editor's notes on four posts: data-driven triggers for moving up to Rork Max, a three-layer AI cost design after Apple opened Foundation Models, WidgetKit within Expo, and catching subscription refunds.
Schema Versioning for Local Data in Rork Apps — Shipping Updates Without Wiping a Single Favorite
How I stopped losing users' locally stored data when shipping updates to Rork apps. A complete TypeScript migration runner with envelope versioning, backup keys, fixture tests, and the rule that keeps EAS Update schema-neutral.