All Articles
Getting Users All the Way to 'Set as Wallpaper' on iOS — Save-to-Photos Permissions and Shortcuts
iOS apps cannot set the wallpaper directly. Here is how I handle add-only photo permissions, Live Photo saving, guiding users to Settings, and Shortcuts automation, with real numbers from running six wallpaper apps.
Running Crash-Free Rate as a Budget: An SLO Design Note for Deciding Where to Invest Across 6 Indie Apps
Notes from running 6 wallpaper apps in parallel and the shift from treating crash-free rate as a pass/fail threshold to treating it as an error budget. A working write-up on turning burn rate into investment and sunset decisions.
Taking Inventory of Your AdMob Ad Units — All the Way to App Open Cooldown Design
When rewarded and interstitial units pile up and you can no longer tell which one fires on which screen, here is the inventory process I use, plus the design for adding a cooldown to an App Open ad that otherwise shows on every launch.
Killing Thumbnail Scroll Jank in an iOS Wallpaper App — Notes on ImageIO Downsampling
Lay out a lot of thumbnails and scrolling stutters while memory balloons. The culprit was full-size image decoding on the main thread. Here is how ImageIO downsampling and prefetching cut measured memory dramatically.
Managing Native Settings Across Rork-Exported Apps with a Custom Expo Config Plugin
Tired of re-typing your AdMob ID and ATT string every time prebuild wipes your Info.plist? Here is how I made native settings reproducible with a custom Expo config plugin and shared it across six wallpaper apps.
Fixing 'TurboModuleRegistry.getEnforcing could not be found' in Rork
A practical walkthrough of the 'TurboModuleRegistry.getEnforcing(...): could not be found' error that became common once the New Architecture went default. Covers Expo Go vs. dev builds, when a native rebuild is required, and how to isolate libraries that aren't New Architecture-ready.
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.
Growing a Staged OTA Update System Without Breaking It
Shipping an EAS Update to every user at once is dangerous. From channel design to staged rollout to automatic rollback, here is the delivery architecture I settled on across 50M cumulative downloads, with working code.
Bringing ProMotion 120Hz to a Wallpaper App — Implementation Notes on CADisableMinimumFrameDurationOnPhone and Reanimated v3
Implementation notes from making a Rork-generated wallpaper app run at 120Hz on ProMotion devices. Covers Info.plist setup, Expo config plugins, Reanimated v3 worklets, FlashList scroll gotchas, and AdMob eCPM lift measured across six wallpaper apps.
Two Weeks of Maintenance After v2.1.0 — Running Crashlytics Triage Through Claude in Chrome
Notes from operating Beautiful 4K/HDR Wallpapers v2.1.0 and Ukiyo-e Wallpapers v1.8.0 through phased rollout. Defensive RecyclerView copies, Glide desugaring, drawable-nodpi placement, and what I now hand off to Claude in Chrome every morning.
Diagnosing 'Network request failed' That Only Hits Android Emulator in Rork
Your fetch returns fine in the iOS simulator but throws 'Network request failed' the moment you switch to Android. Here is the diagnosis order I use to separate localhost, cleartext, certificate, and proxy issues, with code that actually compiles.