All Articles
Pre-Screening Wallpaper App Submissions with Gemini Vision: A Two-Week Field Memo
Before submitting a new batch of wallpapers, I spent two weeks running Gemini's image understanding as a first-pass filter for store review risk. What it caught, what it missed, and where a human still has to decide.
Gemini Live API Audio Sounds Sped Up — Fixing the Sample Rate Mismatch
When Gemini Live API responses sound high-pitched and sped up, or come back full of noise, the cause is almost always that the 24kHz output is being played at a different sample rate. Here are the concrete fixes for both the browser and iOS.
Reconciling Orphaned Gemini Files API Uploads Across a Fleet of Apps
Files API uploads quietly expire after 48 hours. Here's how I keep orphaned files and quota under control across six apps, using reconciliation against my own database and a scheduled cleanup job — written up as production notes from running wallpaper apps.
Three Weeks After Moving Firebase from CocoaPods to SPM with Gemini 3 Pro
Notes from migrating Firebase dependency management from CocoaPods to Swift Package Manager across my indie iOS apps. Where Gemini 3 Pro helped, where it did not, and how the setup felt after three weeks in production.
Recording Provenance for Gemini Output — Designing for Reproducibility and Audit
Before you lose track of which model and prompt produced an output months later: how to stamp provenance metadata onto Gemini generations so quality investigations and model migrations stay reproducible.
A Lightweight Gemini Backend with Bun and Hono — Reclaiming the Small Tools of Indie Development
Has your Node and Express Gemini backend grown heavy with dependencies and build times? Here is how I moved one to Bun and Hono — folding streaming, rate limiting, cost caps, testing, and self-hosting into a single light runtime — along with the pitfalls I hit in production.
Why Firebase AI Logic Returns 403 When Calling Gemini from iOS — And How to Fix It
Firebase AI Logic (formerly Vertex AI in Firebase) often returns 403 PERMISSION_DENIED when calling Gemini from an iOS app. Here is how to isolate the three real causes — App Check enforcement, disabled APIs, and missing Blaze billing — based on hands-on device testing.
A Month of Refreshing App Store Promotional Text Weekly with Gemini
Notes from one month of rewriting App Store promotional text (the 170-character line above the description) weekly with the Gemini API. How I reused a slot that ships without review, what I handed to AI, what I always touched by hand, and whether it moved anything.
Stopping Gemini API Config Drift — Codifying Model IDs and Safety Settings to Catch Cross-Environment Gaps
Most of those puzzling per-app bugs come from drift in model IDs and safety settings between environments. This guide shows how to codify your Gemini config and snapshot the effective settings to detect cross-environment gaps.
Empty Output but finish_reason Is MAX_TOKENS on Gemini 2.5/3: Cause and Fix
Your prompt is just a few lines, yet a low maxOutputTokens on gemini-2.5-flash returns empty text with finish_reason MAX_TOKENS. The culprit is thinking tokens. Here are three fixes with working code.
Mixing Gemini 2.5 Flash and Flash-Lite for App Store Localization
An operations log from running the same wallpaper-app store copy through both Gemini 2.5 Flash and Flash-Lite. Real cost gaps, where the lighter model breaks down, and how I now route by text type and locale.
Measuring the Economics of Each Gemini-Powered Feature — So You Can Keep It, Fix It, or Retire It
Gemini API costs are visible at the account level, but the profitability of an individual feature never shows up on its own. This guide shows how to tag every request, build a per-feature cost ledger, join it with revenue signals from AdMob and in-app purchases to compute contribution margin, and decide whether to keep, fix, or retire each feature — with the code I actually run.