Building an App Store Rejection Workflow with the Gemini API — From Structured Notices to Resolution Center Replies
How I use the Gemini API to parse App Store rejection notices into structured JSON, cross-check guidelines, draft Resolution Center replies, and run pre-submission checks as an indie developer.
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.
One Month with Gemini 2.5 Flash: An Indie Developer's Honest Cost and Performance Report
Real cost, speed, and quality data from running Gemini 2.5 Flash across three indie apps for a full month. Includes free-tier usage patterns, Flash vs Pro decision criteria, and cost-minimizing Python code.
Still image or short clip? Deciding feature placement from the cost gap between Nano Banana 2 Lite and Omni Flash
When I froze over whether a wallpaper app's hero asset should be a still image or a short moving loop, the deciding factor was not taste but the order of magnitude of the cost. Here is how to normalize Nano Banana 2 Lite and Omni Flash onto the same footing, down to a working decision function.
"No Watermark Detected" Doesn't Mean It Isn't AI — The Asymmetry of SynthID
Images generated with Gemini carry a SynthID watermark. But a positive result and a negative result don't carry the same weight, and that asymmetry changes how you should track provenance.
I Was Handing Gemini Obfuscated Stack Traces — Until retrace Went In Front, the Diagnoses Were Confident and Wrong
Release stack traces come out of R8 with the names flattened. Feed one to Gemini as-is and the diagnosis arrives calm, well-written, and wrong. Put retrace in front, match the mapping by versionCode, and forbid confident answers when you cannot restore. Numbers from 42 reports.
A near-miss label won't fix itself on retry — a normalization layer for closed-vocabulary classification
When responseSchema enum returns an out-of-set label, retrying tends to return the same near-miss. From a wallpaper app's 30-category batch, here is the distribution of how labels miss, plus a normalization layer built on an alias table and gemini-embedding-2 nearest-neighbor, with measured results.
When Gemini's Context Cache Quietly Expires Mid-Run: A TTL Guard for Pipelines That Pause
When a nightly batch or a retry backoff pauses your pipeline, Gemini's explicit context cache can expire on the wall clock while nothing errors out, sending later calls back to full-token billing. Here is a small lease guard that decides whether to re-arm or run uncached based on cost.
The Day We Went From 30 Categories to 34 — Reclassifying 1,180 Assets Instead of 8,142
Adding categories to a taxonomy does not require reclassifying everything. Here is how embeddings and confidence margins narrowed a backfill from 8,142 assets to 1,180, with the numbers.
Images Made With a Retiring Model Can Never Be Made Again — Tracking Regenerability in a Ledger
When Gemini's image generation models shut down on August 17, the assets you made with them can no longer be reproduced the same way. Here is the ledger design and code I use to decide, before the deadline, which assets are regenerable and which must be frozen.
One File Search Store for Many Apps: Splitting Retrieval With customMetadata and Chunk Config
Put several apps' FAQs in a single Gemini File Search store and metadataFilter can silently return empty grounding, or answers get split across chunk boundaries. Here is the customMetadata design, the AIP-160 filter-syntax trap, and measured chunkingConfig tuning.
When Two Managed Agents Fight Over the Same Repo: External Leases and Fencing for Isolated Sandboxes
Every Managed Agents run gets its own isolated sandbox, so a local lock cannot stop two runs from touching the same repo or record. Here is how I serialize them safely with an external lease and a fencing token.