Rebuilding the CTR Denominator After AI Search Fans Out Your Queries
My top five queries by impressions all had zero clicks, and four of them were not phrases a person would type. Here is how I rebuilt the denominator and where I let Gemini make the call.
A Provenance Gate That Never Asks Gemini to Name the Country
How I rebuilt the pre-publish provenance check for a ukiyo-e wallpaper app, moving from asking the model to name a country to asking it only to list the marks physically present on the paper. Includes the working code, the decision table that lives on my side, and why an abstain path had to come before accuracy.
Once You Pass Twenty Mediation Groups, How Do You Find the Setting That Went Missing?
As ad mediation groups multiply, missing sources and type drift accumulate quietly. Here is the split I settled on: normalize the settings into one matrix, let code confirm the gaps, and send Gemini only the cells that need judgment.
Why My Length Limit Only Failed on the English Notifications, and the Width-Based Fit That Replaced It
I had Gemini write push notifications in Japanese and English, and only the English ones came out truncated on real devices. The culprit was measuring length in characters. Here are the measured widths and the post-generation fitting code that fixed it.
Before Adding New iPhone Widths, I Had Gemini Write Out the Branches I Already Had
Adding three new screen widths to four apps turned into an extraction job, not a rewrite. Here is why I let Gemini pull the branch table out of the source and kept every pass/fail decision in deterministic code.
Finding the questions your help docs never answer, by asking Gemini to write the quiz
When support keeps asking something your help page already covers, generate questions from that page and check whether the page alone can answer them. A two-pass audit pipeline with call design and cost math.
Evolving Gemini API Structured Output Schemas in Production — Design Notes from an Indie App
How I rebuilt the JSON contract layer for a Gemini-powered recommendation feature in a long-running indie app — Dual-Emit, Sunset protocol, and a Python compatibility checker.
Automating Firebase Crashlytics Analysis with Gemini API — A Real-World Implementation from an Indie App
A real-world implementation record of automating Firebase Crashlytics log analysis with Gemini API, validated during development of an indie wallpaper app (v2.1.0). Includes Before/After code for a RecyclerView crash fix and a production cost breakdown.
When responseSchema Can't Do $ref: Handling Recursive Schemas in Production with responseJsonSchema
Gemini's responseSchema is an OpenAPI subset with no $ref or $defs, so it can't express shared definitions or recursion. Here's how I moved to responseJsonSchema to reuse localized fields and handle a recursive category tree in production.
Render Structured Output Field by Field as It Streams: Safe Partial JSON Parsing
With responseSchema streaming, the screen stays blank until the JSON closes. This walks through a partial parser that safely completes unclosed JSON, plus anti-flicker fencing that never lets a field move backward, and shows how time-to-first-field dropped from about 2.4s to 0.4s in practice.
Extract Social Media Promo Metadata From Short Videos in One Omni Flash Pass
Hand a short clip to the public preview of Gemini Omni Flash once and get captions, chapters, and highlight timestamps back as structured JSON. Covers how this differs from a frame-extraction multi-call setup, where fps and media_resolution actually matter, and a per-clip cost estimate — from the angle of keeping an indie promo workflow moving.
Catching only the deprecations that touch you — feeding the official changelog to url-context
I found out an image model was being shut down three days before the deadline. Here is a deprecation radar that reads the official changelog through url-context and surfaces only the models I actually use, with working Python and the over-alerting tuning I had to do in production.