The Apple-side setup Rork cannot do for you before your first release
Rork Max automates the build, the certificates, and the submission. Your Apple account, contracts, and tax details are still yours to fill in. Here is the order that avoids dead time.
Find the native edits expo prebuild will erase before you upgrade to SDK 57
Expo SDK 57 makes expo prebuild clear and regenerate ios and android by default. Here is how to audit your hand edits first, move them into config plugins, and why 57.0.9 matters for Reanimated apps.
Your lockfile's dev/prod split won't tell you which licenses your app must credit
A record of classifying every dependency in a production project to decide what belongs on an app's license screen, and where the copyleft findings and the actual shipped artifact turned out to disagree.
Switching to Signed URLs Killed My Image Cache — Decoupling expo-image Keys from the URL
Signed URLs rewrite their query string on every expiry, so a URL-keyed cache never hits. Here is how to derive a stable key and drive expo-image's writeToCacheAsync and readFromCacheAsync yourself, with measured results.
Cutting MCP Tools Didn't Make Anything Lighter — 2,377 Bytes of Definitions vs 110,298 Bytes of Response
I wrote a minimal MCP server for a wallpaper catalog and measured the byte cost of tool definitions against the byte cost of responses. Here is which side actually matters, and the real reason to merge tools.
Deciding overlay text legibility at ingest time instead of on device — four metrics measured side by side
Moving the question of whether text stays readable over a wallpaper out of the device and into the content pipeline. Four candidate metrics measured across 240 images, including what downscaled judging actually computes.
A JSON File 19% Smaller That Ships Only 3% Smaller — Measuring Catalog Payloads Against gzip
Five payload formats measured on a 20,000-item wallpaper catalog. Key shortening saves just 3.2% after gzip, while a columnar layout cuts 26.8%. Real numbers for Brotli, paging, and JSON.parse time.
When Two-Character Queries Silently Return Nothing: Measuring Japanese Search Indexes in an Expo App
SQLite FTS5's trigram tokenizer returns zero rows for Japanese queries shorter than three characters, without raising anything. I benchmarked linear scan, a bigram inverted index, and FTS5 over a 20,000-item catalog to find the real threshold.
Every Experiment Kept Landing on the Same Devices: Hash Choice and Salt Position, Measured Across a Million IDs
On-device experiment assignment looked fine in isolation, then collapsed the moment two experiments ran side by side. Here is what one million IDs revealed about four hash functions, why the culprit was the concatenation order rather than hash quality, and the implementation I settled on, with the measured numbers.
What Renovate may bump in an Expo app, and what it must never touch
Turning on automated dependency updates in a Rork-generated app also hands Renovate the 123 packages Expo SDK 57 pins. Measured on 2026-07-30, six of them sit a full major version behind npm latest. Here is how to generate the ignore list from the SDK instead of maintaining it by hand.
Counting what prebuild --clean will erase before you upgrade to Expo SDK 57
A raw diff between two generated ios/ trees showed 649 changed lines; only 3 were real edits. How to count what prebuild --clean erases, and move it into a config plugin.
When to Raise Your Minimum iOS Version — Count Leftover Branches, Not User Percentages
Judging a minimum OS bump by usage share produces the same answer every year, so the decision never happens. Here is the annotation convention, the sweep script that counts how many branches each candidate floor would retire, and what to watch for 30 days after.