Building a Breathing-Paced Haptic for a Meditation App with CoreHaptics
Canned expo-haptics buzzes can't produce the swell of a breath. Here is how to call CoreHaptics continuous events and parameter curves from an Expo native module to build a haptic synced to 4-7-8 breathing, with working Swift and TypeScript code.
DAU Went Up but Retention Didn't — Rebuilding Gamification That Actually Sticks in Rork Apps
Points, badges, and leaderboards lift DAU, but retention is a different story. Field notes on a server-authoritative point ledger, streaks that forgive, and leaderboards that don't crush newcomers — with working code for Rork apps.
Why Wallpapers Look Dull on Device: Taming Display P3 in the Delivery Pipeline
The same wallpaper looked dull once set on device. The culprit was a mix-up between wide-gamut Display P3 and sRGB. Beyond embedding profiles, here is how to tell whether the pixels are truly wide-gamut, a pre-delivery gate script, and the Android wide-color story, across six wallpaper apps.
The Private Screen That Lingers in the App Switcher — Hiding the Snapshot iOS Takes the Moment You Background Your App
When you send a React Native app generated by Rork to the background, iOS photographs the current screen for the App Switcher and writes it to disk. Journals and personal input screens linger there in plain sight. This walks through the iOS privacy overlay (why inactive, not background), Android's FLAG_SECURE, scoping it to sensitive screens only, and screenshot detection — all in working code.
Your Daily Reminder Stops Firing After a Couple of Weeks — iOS's Invisible 64-Notification Cap
When a daily reminder built with Rork (Expo) goes silent after a while, the cause is usually iOS's 64 pending-notification limit. Design a repeating calendar trigger for fixed messages and a rolling reschedule for daily-changing content, with working code that survives DST and multiple reminders.
Build a Toast System in Your Rork App That Survives Overlaps, Screen Readers, and Notches
When you add toast notifications to a React Native app generated by Rork, the naive version breaks in three places: two toasts overlap, screen readers stay silent, and the text hides under the notch or home indicator. This walks through a root-level queue, animations decoupled from your app tree, AccessibilityInfo announcements, and safe-area placement — all in working code.
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.
A Wallpaper App's Real Work Starts After Launch — Content, Retention, and Revenue Notes from Running One on Rork
A wallpaper app is decided less by its launch and more by how you tend it afterward. Building on a Rork implementation, here are field notes on scheduled publishing that keeps content fresh, onboarding that survives the first week, and a revenue setup whose per-download return doesn't thin out over time.
Hardcoding Your OpenAI Key in a Rork (Expo) App Means It Gets Stolen — Slip a Thin Worker Proxy In Between
Embed an OpenAI or Gemini API key directly in the Expo app Rork generates and it can be extracted from the shipped binary. Here is why a key inside an app is never secret, plus a minimal Cloudflare Workers proxy that hides it (streaming passthrough included), simple abuse controls, and key rotation that needs no app review.
Your Rork App's Photos Look Sideways Only After Upload — Normalizing EXIF Orientation and Stripping Location Metadata
A photo that looks upright in your app rotates 90 degrees once it hits your server. The cause is the EXIF Orientation tag. Here's how to bake the rotation into pixels and strip location metadata with expo-image-manipulator before uploading.
Reclaiming the Pre-Submit Checks You Lose When Publishing Without Xcode
Rork Max's two-click publishing skips the Xcode Organizer, making it easy to miss usage strings, version bumps, and Bundle IDs. Here is a quick pre-submit self-audit you can run yourself, with how to read the generated files.
Your List Jumps Back to the Top — Restoring Scroll Position Across Back Navigation and Process Death
How I rebuilt scroll restoration for a wallpaper grid by splitting it into two unrelated problems — back navigation and process death — covering getItemLayout, save timing, and killing the restore flicker.