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.
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.
Retuning AdMob Mediation Priorities: Notes From Trying to Lift My eCPM
A running log of how I manually revisited the network priorities in my AdMob mediation setup to lift eCPM on an indie wallpaper app, what changed compared to leaving it on auto-optimization, and what I noticed along the way.
Rork × EAS Update Runtime Version Strategy — Upgrading Expo SDK Across 6 Apps Without Breaking Existing Users
A complete record of how I migrated 6 Rork-generated apps from Expo SDK 50 to 51 in three weeks without a single user-visible incident — runtimeVersion policies, full eas.json, a safety-gated publish script, and a 30-minute incident recovery playbook.
One Month of Reading Xcode Organizer Hang Reports Only on Friday Afternoons
I switched to reading Xcode Organizer Hang Reports for only thirty minutes every Friday for a month. Here is how it compared with Crashlytics and what actually improved across my wallpaper apps.
Three Weeks Triaging Crashlytics Velocity Alerts With Claude in Chrome
I spent three weeks letting Claude in Chrome open Firebase and triage Crashlytics Velocity Alerts for my wallpaper app. Here is what actually got easier, and what still needs human judgment.
Minimal Customer Support Architecture for Solo Rork Devs — Running Inquiries for Multiple Apps Alone
The minimum-viable customer support stack I run as a solo developer maintaining a dozen apps with 50M cumulative downloads — in-app form with auto-attached diagnostics, Gmail filtering, reply templates, and the escalation rules that keep me under thirty minutes a day.
Is Rork's Generated Code Production-Ready? 3 Pitfalls I Found After 50M Downloads
After 50M cumulative app downloads, I tested Rork's generated code against real production scenarios and found 3 recurring crash patterns. Here's what to audit before shipping Rork-generated code, with concrete before/after examples.
Why Nesting Your Android Ad Gate Logic Causes Hard-to-Debug Bugs — Fixing It with Parallel Structure
A nested ad gate bug in Beautiful HD Wallpapers v2.1.0 led me to rethink how ad-free logic should be structured in Android apps. The parallel structure pattern I use now also improves Rork-generated code.
Evaluating Rork Max SwiftUI Output After 12 Years of Native App Development
An honest review of Rork Max's SwiftUI generation quality from someone who has been shipping native wallpaper apps for 12 years and 50 million downloads. What worked, what didn't, and where I rewrote the code myself.
AdMob Mediation Dropped My eCPM by 30% After I Set It Up — What Went Wrong and How I Fixed It
My eCPM dropped 30% the morning after enabling AdMob mediation. Drawing on years of indie monetization work, here are the pitfalls I found in Rork apps, how to verify adapters are actually alive, how to derive floors from real data, and how to decide whether mediation is worth it at all.
What I Discovered Expanding My Rork App to Android — Key Differences Between App Store and Google Play
What actually differs between shipping to the App Store and shipping to Google Play — the AAB requirement, the 12-tester closed testing rule for new personal accounts, Data safety, staged rollouts, and how search works on each store.