Awesome Apps

03/09/2026

Most app briefs arrive over-specified. Accounts, sync, notifications, a recommendation engine, social sharing, an admin dashboard.

• The whole app is four screens
• What we kept
• What we left out

Read the full post — link in the first comment. 👇

02/09/2026

The most expensive way to discover your app has no content is to finish building it first.

• The gate: three thresholds, decided before we looked
• The result
• Then we built one slice for real

Read the full post — link in the first comment. 👇

01/09/2026

Every React Native codebase has a MOCKVIEW somewhere.

• Finding M1: the placeholder that could act
• Finding M2: a fire-and-forget logout
• Finding M7: a token from the right user, for the wrong app

Read the full post — link in the first comment. 👇

27/08/2026

27/08/2026

If your app has a login screen, you've probably asked: should we implement Apple Sign-In, Google Sign-In, or both?

Disclosure: this covers products we have an affiliate relationship with. We may earn a commission if you buy through our links. It costs you nothing and it does not change what we recommend.

• The Quick Answer
• Apple Sign-In: Privacy-First Authentication
• Google OAuth: Rich User Data

Read the full post — link in the first comment. 👇

26/08/2026

Our iOS production build failed with no source change at all. Same commit, same dependencies, green one day and red the next.

The build image had moved underneath us. EAS rolled its latest tag to Xcode 26, Apple's compiler tightened one rule, and a library bundled with React Native stopped compiling as a result.

The fix was one line. The lesson is bigger: a build image tagged latest is a dependency you never pinned and never chose to upgrade, on a schedule someone else sets. If you are working to a store deadline, that is a scheduling risk worth writing down.

Read the full breakdown and the five-minute triage: https://eawesome.com.au/blog/xcode-26-fmt-consteval-react-native-build-break/

26/08/2026

Our account deletion endpoint worked for users who had never used the app, and returned an error for everyone who had.

A single bare delete statement produced two failures at once. Users with history got a foreign key violation and kept their account. Users without history got a successful delete that quietly left all their other data behind, and that is the one nobody reports, because it looks like it worked.

Both app stores and Australian Privacy Principle 11.2 care about the outcome, not whether an endpoint exists. Ours existed. It was wired to a real button with correct copy. It did not do the thing.

Read the full breakdown, including the four checks you can run on your own app this week: https://eawesome.com.au/blog/account-deletion-endpoint-500-orphaned-data/

25/08/2026

Our sitemap listed hundreds of articles and Google had indexed one.

One Config Line Turned Every Canonical URL Into a Redirect

Full breakdown 👇
https://eawesome.com.au/blog/trailing-slash-canonical-indexing-collapse/

24/08/2026

Building a page required by the Google Play store turned up something we did not expect about our own app.

The Play Store Asked for Account Deletion. We Found We Were Promising Five Years.

Full breakdown 👇
https://eawesome.com.au/blog/play-store-account-deletion-data-safety-retention/

21/08/2026

Our sitemap listed 419 blog posts. Google had one of them indexed.

One line of configuration was the cause. Every canonical URL we published pointed at a redirect, so every instruction we gave Google was really an instruction to go somewhere else.

The reason it went unnoticed for so long:

• A 308 redirect is invisible to a person — click it and the page loads instantly
• Clicking around your own site finds nothing wrong
• The only symptom is a ratio in Search Console that looks like a content problem

It is not a content problem. Content quality does not produce a clean sweep of one indexed page out of 419.

Read the full post — link in the first comment. 👇