Build Your Settings Screen From One Schema and Reuse It Across Apps
Hand-building a settings screen per app falls apart as your app count grows. Here is a schema-driven design that assembles the screen from declarative data and shares a common base across multiple apps, with working code.
The Post You Wrote Offline Shows Up Twice — Designing a Send Outbox That Survives Retries
Persisting a queue and replaying it isn't enough — a lost response turns into a duplicate write. Here's a send outbox with idempotency keys, temp-to-server ID remapping, and poison-message quarantine, in working TypeScript.
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.
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.
Offline-First Sync for SwiftData in Rork Max — Merging Changes Without Conflicts
How to make the SwiftData apps Rork Max generates sync offline-first so edits survive a flaky connection. Instead of overwriting whole rows, we merge per change, propagate deletes with tombstones, and queue writes that can be resent — shown in code, with the production trade-offs that actually mattered.
Designing CloudKit Sync in a Rork Max Native App — Handling Conflicts and Deletes
You want the same data on iPhone and iPad. When you add CloudKit to a Swift app generated by Rork Max, the hard part is not saving — it is conflicts and deletes. Here are the design decisions I settled on.
Building a Room-Measuring App with Rork Max and RoomPlan — Absorbing Scan Variance by Design
Now that Rork Max generates native Swift, a LiDAR-based RoomPlan scanning app is a realistic project for an indie developer. Scan results drift depending on device and how you hold it. This walks through how to absorb that drift in your app design and export stable dimensions.
Drawing the Line Between Rork Max's Swift Output and the Expo Build
Rork Max now generates native Swift, while the standard Rork keeps producing Expo (React Native) apps. Here is how to split responsibilities between the two engines inside a single app business, viewed from real maintenance cost.
Guarding Analytics Events With Types Across Six Rork Apps — A Shared Event Layer
After event names drifted across six apps and quietly broke my dashboards, I built a typed event registry and a thin wrapper to centralize tracking, plus a CI check that catches schema drift. Here is the design, with the code I actually use.
Measuring the Real eCPM Yourself: Piping Impression-Level Ad Revenue Into Your Own Analytics
The AdMob dashboard's average eCPM hides which regions and placements actually earn. Here is how I capture per-impression revenue with paidEventListener, normalize it, and pipe it into my own analytics to compute a real eCPM by network, placement, and country.
Shipping Six Wallpaper Apps From One Codebase: A White-Label Build Setup with app.config.ts and EAS
Maintaining near-identical wallpaper apps in separate repos means every fix has to be copied six times — and one day you miss one. Here is the white-label setup I moved to: one codebase that emits six apps through a single APP_VARIANT, with the real app.config.ts and eas.json, plus a validation script that catches config drift before the build runs.
Managing Startup Time as a Budget: How I Deferred SDK Init Across Six Apps
Instead of optimizing startup ad hoc, I switched to allocating a per-phase time budget and defending it. Here's how I deferred SDK init across six Rork-built apps and added a CI gate that fails the build when the budget is exceeded.