Why Reinstalling Users Don't Return to 'First Run' — A First-Launch and State-Persistence Design for Rork (Expo) Apps
How to fix broken first-launch detection, onboarding, and free-trial state on reinstall in a Rork-generated Expo app, by treating it as an asymmetry in storage persistence. Covers what survives uninstall on iOS vs Android, separating install and version axes, and server-authoritative entitlements, with implementation.
Why Untranslated Strings Leak to Production Every Time You Add a Language — A Catalog and Gap-Detection Design for Rork (Expo) Apps
A design for stopping untranslated strings from leaking into production after you localize a Rork-generated Expo app. Covers a single source-of-truth catalog, CI-based missing/extra key detection, explicit fallback chains, plurals, and pseudolocalization for layout — with implementation.
Why Your 9 AM Reminder Stops Arriving Abroad — Making Expo Local Notifications Survive Time Zones and DST
Daily reminders built with Rork (Expo) can drift to the wrong local time when users travel or DST flips. Here is the timeInterval trap, and a design that reschedules against local wall-clock time, with working code.
Three Builds on One iPhone: Environment Separation for Rork (Expo) Apps
Split a Rork-generated Expo app into dev, staging, and production builds that live side by side on one device. A hands-on walkthrough of dynamic app.config.ts, eas.json profiles, and isolating notifications, analytics, and billing per environment.
Why Paying Members See a Paywall in Airplane Mode — Keeping RevenueCat Entitlements Alive Offline
Open the app on a weak connection and a paying subscriber sees a paywall flash for a second. Here is how RevenueCat's customerInfo wavers on an offline launch, and a cache design that keeps entitlements valid with a trust window — written as working code for an Expo app.
Keeping Your Rork App's Expo SDK Upgradable Year After Year — Release Trains and Regression Safety Nets
A maintenance design for keeping Rork-generated Expo apps running through yearly Expo SDK upgrades without breakage. Covers release-train cadence, dependency pinning, regression safety nets, and splitting OTA from store delivery, with real examples.
When an Image-Heavy Rork App Quietly Bloats Its Cache and Dies on Memory — Field Notes on Measuring and Capping
In a Rork app where images are the product, expo-image's disk cache and resident memory creep up over a session and surface as OOM crashes. Here's how I measured the bloat, where I set caps, and what I trimmed on the delivery side — with working code, in the order that actually helped.
When EAS Update Ships but the Bug Won't Die — Why OTA Stalls Silently, and How I Operate Around It
EAS Update can succeed and still fail to reach a slice of your users. These are field notes on runtimeVersion drift, updates that publish but never get adopted, and choosing the right rollback — with the instrumentation that actually helped on my Rork apps.
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.