Shipping Notifications Without Asking First — Provisional Authorization in Rork Apps, and the Expo Snippet That Quietly Undoes It
iOS lets you start delivering notifications with no permission dialog at all, via provisional authorization. The catch: expo-notifications reports granted as false for provisional devices, so the registration snippet in Expo's own docs re-requests permission and fires the very dialog you were avoiding. Here's why granted lies, a hook that models authorization as five states, how to write notifications for quiet delivery, when to ask for the upgrade, and how to keep provisional out of your CTR.
The Three-Minute Video That Kept Failing — Moving Rork's Gemini Uploads Off the Worker
How I rerouted video uploads to the Gemini Files API from a Cloudflare Workers relay to a direct device-to-Google path — why the 128MB isolate limit breaks the relay, how to hand out a resumable upload URL without leaking your API key, and how resolution and frame rate actually decide the bill.
Killing the Export Compliance Prompt in Rork Builds for Good
Every Rork and Rork Max build lands in App Store Connect with a Missing Compliance warning. Here is how to decide whether you qualify for the exemption, and how to set it once in app.json or Info.plist so the question never returns.
Placing Native Ads in a Masonry Wallpaper Grid: Designing the Lifetime of an Ad Cell
One native ad in a masonry gallery pushed memory from 180 MB to 420 MB over twenty minutes of scrolling. Here is why cell recycling and ad object lifetime never line up, the pool-based implementation that fixed it, and how I picked the insertion interval from measured numbers.
The Comma That Fell to the Start of a Line: Rork, Quote Cards, and Japanese Line Breaking
React Native's Text component does not guarantee Japanese line-breaking rules. Here are the violation rates I measured, a WORD JOINER implementation that survives copy and VoiceOver, an onTextLayout audit harness, and how Rork Max (SwiftUI) differs.
On-Device Image Classification: TFLite on React Native or Core ML on Rork Max — How I Chose After Building Both
Adding on-device image classification means choosing between TFLite on React Native and Core ML on Rork Max. I built the same feature both ways, measured the end-to-end breakdown, and worked out what the decision actually hinges on.
Half the Bytes, the Same Wait: What AVIF Actually Cost My Wallpaper Apps
Switching to AVIF cut my transfer bill in half and did nothing for perceived speed. Here is the transfer-versus-decode breakdown, the Accept-negotiation trade-off, per-device fallback tiers, and the staged migration order that finally worked across six apps.
Long-Press Context Menus for a Gallery Item in a Rork Expo App
Long-pressing a wallpaper card does nothing, yet iOS users expect a preview and a menu. From why Pressable alone falls short, to a native context menu with zeego, resolving the scroll-vs-long-press conflict, wiring up save and share, and a custom overlay fallback for Android — all with working code.
Undo That Jumps to the Wrong Place — Designing Edit History You Can Trust
Snapshotting the whole state on every edit crushes memory after a few dozen steps. Here's an undo/redo built on command history plus snapshots, with coalescing, a depth cap, and cross-session persistence, in working TypeScript.
Adding React Compiler to Expo Let Me Delete 41 Hand-Written memo Calls
I enabled React Compiler on Rork-generated React Native screens and measured the rerender counts with Profiler. Here is how I decided which memo and useCallback calls were safe to delete, how to find the components the compiler bailed out on, and how to catch regressions in CI.
Every Key You Ship Is Public: Secret Boundaries and Rotation for Rork-Generated Apps
Unzip your own .ipa, run strings, and your environment variables are right there in plain text. Here is how I sort keys into three tiers, move the dangerous ones behind an edge proxy, and keep a rotation runbook that assumes leakage.
Holding Layer Boundaries in a Rork-Generated Expo App with ESLint and dependency-cruiser
Long-lived Rork-generated Expo apps quietly accumulate screens that import the API client directly. Here is how I froze 214 existing violations as a baseline, eliminated 17 circular dependencies, and made CI reject anything new for 38 extra seconds.