How the internet’s favorite squirrel dad created a successful camera app

It is not an exaggeration to call DualShot recorder An overnight sensation.

It took just 12 hours from the time of its release to reach the first place in the list of top paid apps in the App Store. It’s been a surprise hit — but what’s even more surprising is the app’s origin story: It all started with a cadre of friendly neighborhood squirrels and their favorite supervisor.

Derek Downey Jr. has built his career on short videos documenting his interactions with squirrels visiting his yard in Los Angeles. for him Instagram and Tik Tok accounts They each have more than a million followers (myself included) who know well the regular cast of characters: Maxine, Richard and less frequent but affectionately named visitors like Hudrat Raymond. Downey treats them with lots of nuts, specially designed shelters, and trips to the local vet when emergency medical care is needed. It’s as cheerful and healthy as it gets.

He was looking to create a YouTube series, but had trouble finding a way to take vertical and horizontal shots simultaneously. Other creators solve this problem by using a special device with two phones or cameras to shoot at once, or by cropping the clip in both formats in post-processing. “I’ve tried going out and buying different devices, devices, hubs, and additional phones to set up to accommodate this…but it’s getting too cumbersome,” he says. “The editing…it was all too much.” And cropping in post has drawbacks, too: The iPhone camera uses a full-sensor crop when recording video. Doing a 16:9 vertical crop from the middle of that already cropped frame means you’re only using a small portion of the overall sensor, which loses a lot of resolution and limits your framing options.

Last year, he had the idea of ​​trying to create an app to solve the problem. He’s not a software developer, and he tried ChatGPT to try to code something. This didn’t work out, so he put the project aside. But earlier this year, something told him he should try again.

“I entered the code and the camera activated. And I said OK, maybe we’ve got something here.” He did some digging into the iPhone’s camera capabilities to see what might be possible. Apple’s Camera API allows third-party developers to access footage of the entire sensor, which is what other app developers do It has benefited in the past. Downey saw an opportunity to use this capability to solve the multiple aspect ratio problem. With this full sensor readout, his app can save horizontal and vertical crops from that original video — all in-camera without losing resolution. After three or four months and a lot of quick engineering, he had a working app.

The project started using ChatGPT, and Downey tried using Google Antigravity Well, but he says Claude was the tool that really made it possible. Like anyone who has worked with AI tools, he has learned to deal with their quirks and inaccuracies. “I understand the product I’m trying to create, I understand the function and what I’m looking for, and there were moments when the response (given by Claude) was not accurate,” he says. “You might think that because you are giving directions to this device that it will give you accurate data. But I found that is not the case, so I have to correct it.” Realizing this, he says he double-checks and triple-reviews everything he’s asked to do.

After the app was ready, he said he looked into putting it on Apple’s App Store. It seemed possible. “I said, ‘Okay, well, let’s put it out there and share it.’ He priced it at a one-time cost of $6.99, and within the first 12 hours, DualShot recorder It became the number one paid app in the store. It remained at that top spot for eight days, Downey recounts, and remains in the top 20 at the time of this writing.

was the reply Overwhelmingly positive. The price is now $9.99, but there is still no subscription, no user data is collected, and the videos remain entirely on your device. The app also includes a lot of fine-grained quality and resolution controls, and even lets you record from two different cameras on the same device simultaneously. It’s a refreshingly simple value proposition. Downey says it was important to refrain from automatically collecting user data, but that made it difficult to identify and fix errors. It is adding a troubleshooting feature so users can submit a bug report when they encounter problems.

It was an overwhelming but refreshing change for Downey. “I’ve been losing a lot of sleep, which I don’t really mind,” he told me. “I’m all about balance, but when something fuels you, sometimes you lose sleep over it. That’s what was happening.” He describes the project as exciting and giving him a new sense of purpose. But he admits that maintaining a successful app may require change of some kind. “There are a lot of new things coming, and I embrace that.”

Downey is open about his mental health with his followers, and credits his interactions with his chipmunk friends as the thing that helped pull him out of a dark time. During times when his channel is quiet, he will share an update stating that he is not in the right place to make videos. He says his community is supportive. “They’re saying: ‘Take your time. We’re not going anywhere. We’ll be here.’

Wherever his change takes him, Downey says there’s one thing that doesn’t change: spending time with the squirrels. As the initial “chaos” as he calls it since launching the app has faded, he’s been able to get back to making time for Richard, Maxine and his other furry visitors. “They met me at a place where I was struggling with depression. And that’s family. So, even if I can’t really show up online like I usually do, I still take care of them.”