Tuning Interstitial Ad Fatigue Across Six Rork iOS Wallpaper Apps with Crashlytics and Remote Config
An implementation note from running six Rork-built iOS wallpaper apps in parallel and rebalancing interstitial fatigue with a three-layer frequency cap powered by Crashlytics non-fatal signals and Remote Config thresholds. Swift code, Cloudflare Workers config, and measured eCPM / D1 retention numbers from a four-week phased rollout.
Two Weeks Tightening Up iPad Support for a Rork-Generated Wallpaper App
Notes from spending two weeks tightening up iPad support for a wallpaper app I scaffolded with Rork. Coming from an iPhone-centric indie practice since 2014, I cover where Rork's defaults stopped, how the AdMob adaptive banner misbehaved on iPad, and what changed in retention afterwards.
Aggregating App Store Connect, RevenueCat, and AdMob into One Morning Digest with Cloudflare Workers — A Six-App Indie Architecture
A practical architecture for indie developers running multiple Rork apps: aggregate App Store Connect API, RevenueCat REST, and AdMob Reporting API in a Cloudflare Workers Cron job and ship a single daily Slack digest each morning.
How I Layered Rewarded, Interstitial, and App Open Ads to Lift ARPDAU 1.4× on My Wallpaper App
Optimizing AdMob's three formats individually hit a ceiling — they were eating each other's impressions. After redesigning Rewarded, Interstitial, and App Open as a coordinated 3-layer system with strict role separation and an exclusion gate, ARPDAU climbed 1.4× over nine weeks. The full playbook, code, and weekly numbers.
iOS Memory Pressure on Rork Apps — A 5-Tier Release Architecture from 12 Years of Wallpaper Apps
A 5-tier memory release architecture for Rork-built iOS apps, refined while running wallpaper apps to a cumulative 50 million downloads. Includes the Instruments + MetricKit measurement flow that brought OOM rate from 4.3% to 0.36%.
One Month with Rork Max AI Cloud: Latency, Cost, and the Hybrid Setup I Settled On
A month of running Rork Max AI Cloud beside local M-series execution: p50/p95 latency distributions, real monthly cost, the benchmark script I used, and a budget ledger that actually stops spending.
Designing AdMob App Open Ad Frequency Without Hurting Retention — Operational Notes from Wallpaper Apps
Implementation notes from rebuilding the AdMob App Open Ad frequency design in a recent wallpaper app update. Minimum intervals, cold-start exceptions, and post-modal suppression are controlled dynamically through Remote Config, with Claude in Chrome handling the daily dashboard review.
Three Months of Letting Claude in Chrome Help with App Store Review Replies
For most of my twelve years as an indie developer, App Store and Google Play review replies kept slipping to the bottom of the list. I spent three months letting Claude in Chrome help with the drafting, and the way I face one-star reviews changed in ways I didn't expect.
Automating Production Incident Response as a Solo Developer — Crashlytics, Sentry, Slack Routing, and Staged Rollback
Twelve years of running my own iPhone and Android apps, accumulating 50 million downloads, taught me a specific shape for production incident response. This article shares the Crashlytics + Sentry double layer, Slack routing into interrupt and log channels, and a Remote Config plus EAS Update staged rollback I keep returning to.
A month of running Rork and Claude on Xcode side by side — where each one ended up fitting
Notes from an indie developer who has shipped wallpaper apps on iOS and Android since 2014. After a month of keeping both Rork and Claude on Xcode open on the same desk, the work that fit each one turned out to be more obvious than I expected.
Auto-Throttling AdMob When Crash Rates Spike: A Revenue-Protecting Brake Architecture with Rork, Firebase Remote Config, and Crashlytics
When crash rates spike, do you keep showing ads and watch your store rating crater, or pull back and accept the lost revenue? After 12 years of indie operations, my answer is neither: a four-state auto-throttle architecture that ties Firebase Remote Config and Crashlytics signals into AdMob serving decisions.
Rork × Firebase Remote Config: Tuning AdMob Safely in Production — Run App Open Frequency Caps Without a Release
From the experience of pushing wallpaper-app App Open ads too hard and watching DAU drop, here is a design for treating AdMob format mix, frequency caps, and exclusions as a Firebase Remote Config contract. Expo/Rork wiring, fail-safe defaults, A/B testing, and metric joins included.