The Next Beacon — Insightshttps://thenextbeacon.com/insights/Notes from building and launching apps and web platforms.en What to prepare before you talk to an app studiohttps://thenextbeacon.com/insights/what-to-prepare-before-hiring-an-app-studio/https://thenextbeacon.com/insights/what-to-prepare-before-hiring-an-app-studio/Tue, 06 Oct 2026 09:00:00 GMTThe few things that turn a first call into a useful one and an estimate into a real number. No technical knowledge needed. Sending email from a Cloudflare Worker over plain SMTPhttps://thenextbeacon.com/insights/smtp-email-from-cloudflare-worker/https://thenextbeacon.com/insights/smtp-email-from-cloudflare-worker/Tue, 06 Oct 2026 09:00:00 GMTHow our contact form sends email straight from a Cloudflare Worker to an ordinary mailbox provider, using TCP sockets and about 60 lines of SMTP. Seamless video loops with Remotionhttps://thenextbeacon.com/insights/seamless-video-loops-remotion/https://thenextbeacon.com/insights/seamless-video-loops-remotion/Tue, 06 Oct 2026 09:00:00 GMTHow we turned our logo into a looping hero video with Remotion, why every animated value is a function of the loop's time, and how we check the seam. Why Safari would not play our video, and the 30-line Worker that fixed ithttps://thenextbeacon.com/insights/range-requests-video-cloudflare-workers/https://thenextbeacon.com/insights/range-requests-video-cloudflare-workers/Tue, 06 Oct 2026 09:00:00 GMTCloudflare Workers static assets answer range requests with the whole file, and Safari refuses to play video served that way. How we found and fixed it. Never lose a save: cloud saves with immutable blobs and compare-and-swaphttps://thenextbeacon.com/insights/never-lose-a-save-compare-and-swap/https://thenextbeacon.com/insights/never-lose-a-save-compare-and-swap/Tue, 06 Oct 2026 09:00:00 GMTA robust design for syncing user data across devices: write-once blobs plus one pointer updated with compare-and-swap, so a save is never overwritten by accident. Building Expo Android apps locally instead of in the cloudhttps://thenextbeacon.com/insights/expo-android-builds-locally/https://thenextbeacon.com/insights/expo-android-builds-locally/Tue, 06 Oct 2026 09:00:00 GMTRelease Android builds for an Expo app on our own Linux machines with eas build --local: exact toolchain versions and the Gradle memory settings that work. Running a real app on the Cloudflare Workers free planhttps://thenextbeacon.com/insights/cloudflare-workers-free-plan-limits/https://thenextbeacon.com/insights/cloudflare-workers-free-plan-limits/Tue, 06 Oct 2026 09:00:00 GMTWhat the free plan's 10 ms of CPU per request means in practice, and the design choices that keep a live travel app inside it. Why Apple rejects apps, and how to get approved next timehttps://thenextbeacon.com/insights/app-store-rejections-explained/https://thenextbeacon.com/insights/app-store-rejections-explained/Tue, 06 Oct 2026 09:00:00 GMTThe App Store rejections we see most often, what Apple actually means by them, and the fixes that get an app through review on the next try.