Win Back Lapsed Users with App Store In-App Events — Deep Link Implementation for Rork (Expo) Apps
An implementation memo on bringing lapsed users back to a Rork (Expo) app using App Store in-app events. Covers event card design, universal link routing, and measurement, from a solo developer's operational view.
You Only Get to Ask Once — Implementing a Notification Soft-Ask in Your Rork App to Lift Opt-In
On iOS, once a user denies the notification prompt you can never show it again. In a Rork (Expo) app, instead of firing the system prompt on launch, we add our own soft-ask screen and only request permission once the value has landed. Built with expo-notifications, covering Android 13 POST_NOTIFICATIONS, a recovery path after denial, and opt-in measurement.
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.
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 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.
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.
Adding a Home Screen Widget to a Rork App — Making WidgetKit Work Within Expo's Constraints
Rork generates Expo apps, and home screen widgets can't be written in React Native. Here's how to wire up WidgetKit with a config plugin and App Groups — including the parts that tripped me up.
Keeping a wallpaper app's binary small: moving images out of the bundle
Wallpaper apps bloat every time you add images. Here is where I draw the line between bundled and remote assets, how I keep first paint fast with prefetching, and the format work that cut transfer size to a third — with real numbers.
expo start --offline Says 'forbidden'? Corporate Proxy (403) vs Dependency Validation
Two different failures make 'expo start --offline' or EXPO_OFFLINE=1 die with 'forbidden': an HTTP 403 from a corporate proxy, and Expo CLI validateDependenciesVersions guard. How to tell them apart, when to set HTTP_PROXY to route through the proxy, and when to go fully offline with pre-generated caches instead.
Putting a Wallpaper Shuffle in Control Center — a ControlWidget in a Rork (Expo) App, Rebuilt for iOS 26
Field notes on bolting a Control Center control (ControlWidget) onto a Rork-built React Native wallpaper app — App Group sharing, AppIntent, the Expo config plugin that survives prebuild, and what changed when I rebuilt it for iOS 26 accented rendering.
Unifying Onboarding Across Six Wallpaper Apps: What One Month of First-Day Retention Showed Me
I folded the onboarding flows of six wallpaper apps scaffolded with Rork into a single config-driven component and watched first-day retention and push opt-in for a month. Here is an honest, operational note on what moved and what didn't.
Fixing 'No bundle URL present' on a Release Build to a Real iOS Device
How to read the 'No bundle URL present' error that shows up when you build a Rork-exported app locally in Xcode. We separate the Metro-connection case from the missing-embedded-bundle case, and walk through generating an offline bundle by hand with working commands.