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.
When a Poisoned Cache Crashes Your App on Every Launch — Designing a Safe-Mode Boot Your Users Can Escape On Their Own
When a persisted cache goes bad and the app crashes at the same spot on every launch, the only option left to the user is to reinstall. This article designs a safe-mode boot for Expo (React Native): the app counts its own early crashes, confirms a launch only once it becomes interactive, and resets just the dangerous state in graduated steps.
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.