All Articles
3 Months Using Gemini API as My App Backend — An Indie Developer's Honest Review
I adopted Gemini API as the backbone for a new app and ran it in production for three months. Here is what the costs, latency, and quality actually looked like — and how I split work across Gemini, Claude, and GPT-4o.
Controlling thinking_budget in Gemini 2.5 Pro — Cut Costs by 70% Without Sacrificing Reasoning Quality
Leaving thinking_budget unset in Gemini 2.5 Pro leads to unexpected costs. This guide covers task-level budget design, dynamic control, and production monitoring with working Python code.
Building an AdMob Revenue Anomaly Detector with Gemini API Function Calling
Learn how to build an automatic AdMob revenue anomaly detection system using Gemini API Function Calling — with real Python code, practical tips from 10+ years of indie app development, and Slack alerting integration.
Google AI Studio Build Mode Not Working — Blank Preview, Deploy Failures, and Other Common Issues
Troubleshoot Google AI Studio Build Mode issues: blank preview panels, prompts that don't apply, Firebase deployment failures, and code getting overwritten. Each problem with a concrete fix.
What Happens When You Show Your Own Artwork to Gemini Vision — An Honest Review from a Maker and a Developer
I fed my own art images into Gemini Vision to test what it reads and what it misses. An honest, indie-developer look at where it's genuinely useful for running a wallpaper app, and where it still falls short.
Maximizing Revenue in Indie iOS Wallpaper Apps with AdMob + Gemini API
A decade of indie app development reveals how to balance AdMob revenue against Gemini API costs. Learn architecture patterns, cost control strategies, and Freemium gate implementation for AI-powered wallpaper apps.
Automating Pre-Release UI Checks with Gemini 3.2 Flash Vision — A Personal Dev Story
How I used Gemini 3.2 Flash's multimodal input to automatically QA iOS/Android app screenshots before each release. Detect text overflow, dark mode contrast issues, and layout breaks with a 30-line Python script — and why this works for indie developers without a QA team.
Gemini File API Stuck in PROCESSING State: Timeout Handling and Retry Design
Fix Gemini File API files stuck in PROCESSING state. Learn proper polling with exponential backoff, timeout design, and cleanup strategies with working Python code examples.
Gemini API vs Claude API vs GPT-4o: Measured Costs from a Production Wallpaper App Pipeline
Real-world cost, speed, and output quality benchmarks for Gemini API, Claude API, and GPT-4o, measured on a wallpaper app metadata pipeline running in production.
A Week Using Gemini CLI for iOS App Development: An Indie Dev's Honest Report
An indie developer with 50M+ app downloads shares a week-long experiment integrating Gemini CLI into iOS development. Covers translation, release notes, code review, and an honest comparison with Claude Code.
Gemini 3.2 API Suddenly Broke — 5 Common Errors and How to Fix Them
Switched to Gemini 3.2 API and hit a wall? This guide covers 5 common errors developers encounter during migration — wrong model IDs, rate limits, context overflow, streaming interruptions, and Function Calling schema failures — with working code fixes.
Personalized Push Notifications at Scale: Gemini 3 Pro × Firebase Cloud Messaging for Indie App Developers
If your push notification open rates have plateaued, this guide shows how to combine Gemini 3 Pro with Firebase Cloud Messaging to generate per-user copy. Includes the production architecture, working code, PII guardrails, and real cost numbers from a live indie app.