Trimming App Size for Rork Max Apps: App Thinning and On-Demand Resources
Rork Max ships images and fonts straight into the bundle, so a generated SwiftUI app quietly grows heavy. Here is how I use App Thinning and On-Demand Resources to shrink the first download, with the device numbers I measured and a size budget you can run.
Designing WidgetKit Timelines Around the Refresh Budget: Why My Wallpaper Widgets Stopped
Why does a home screen widget stop updating after the evening? A clear look at WidgetKit timeline design through three lenses: the refresh budget, the reload policy, and entry density. With a working TimelineProvider, an entry design that does not burn through the budget, and relevance-based prioritization, drawn from running six wallpaper apps solo.
Keeping a wallpaper app's binary small: moving images out of the bundle
Wallpaper apps bloat every time you add images. Here is where I draw the line between bundled and remote assets, how I keep first paint fast with prefetching, and the format work that cut transfer size to a third — with real numbers.
When Your Android Vitals ANR Rate Climbs: Notes on Keeping the Main Thread Free in React Native
How I traced and fixed a rising Android Vitals ANR rate in a Rork-built React Native app, plus the main-thread rules I rolled out across six apps in production.
Managing Startup Time as a Budget: How I Deferred SDK Init Across Six Apps
Instead of optimizing startup ad hoc, I switched to allocating a per-phase time budget and defending it. Here's how I deferred SDK init across six Rork-built apps and added a CI gate that fails the build when the budget is exceeded.
Killing Thumbnail Scroll Jank in an iOS Wallpaper App — Notes on ImageIO Downsampling
Lay out a lot of thumbnails and scrolling stutters while memory balloons. The culprit was full-size image decoding on the main thread. Here is how ImageIO downsampling and prefetching cut measured memory dramatically.
iOS Memory Pressure on Rork Apps — A 5-Tier Release Architecture from 12 Years of Wallpaper Apps
A 5-tier memory release architecture for Rork-built iOS apps, refined while running wallpaper apps to a cumulative 50 million downloads. Includes the Instruments + MetricKit measurement flow that brought OOM rate from 4.3% to 0.36%.
Why FlatList's onEndReached Fires Multiple Times — and How to Stop It
After wiring up infinite scroll in a Rork-generated FlatList, you may notice the same paginated request hitting your API two or three times in a row. Here's why onEndReached fires more often than you expect and how to add a two-layer defense that survives production.
Switching from Context API to Zustand v5 in Rork Apps: What Changed and Why It Worked
Context API caused cascading re-renders in a growing Rork app. Here's how migrating to Zustand v5 solved it — with practical patterns for auth state and async logic in React Native.
Slow Images in My Rork Wallpaper App: Switching to expo-image and What Actually Changed
A hands-on account of switching from React Native's default Image component to expo-image in a Rork-generated wallpaper app — with code examples, blur hash setup, and observable performance improvements.
Adding Swift Charts to a Rork Max App: Setup, and Why It Stutters Past a Few Hundred Points
How to drop Swift Charts into the SwiftUI code Rork Max generates, where the framework starts choking once your dataset grows past a thousand points, and the downsampling and animation patterns that keep things at 60 fps on real devices.
Animation Jank in Rork Apps — How I Diagnosed Frame Drops and Fixed Them
Animations in your Rork app running smoothly in the preview but stuttering on a real device? This guide explains how to diagnose frame drops, why they happen, and how one line of code often fixes the problem completely.