Viral Squirrel creator’s app reaches No. 1 on App Store in 12 hours<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\nDerrick Downey Jr. has spent years amassing a following of over a million people on both Instagram and TikTok by documenting the arrival of the squirrels, Maxine, Richard, and occasionally the character he calls Hoodrat Raymond, to his Los Angeles patio.<\/p>\n
He didn’t plan to become a solo app developer. That changed when he tried to launch a YouTube series and first ran into a problem that none of the existing tools could apparently solve.<\/p>\n
Creators creating content for both short-form vertical platforms and horizontal YouTube face an inconvenient choice: buy a second device and rig, or accept the resolution loss caused by cropping a vertical frame from footage already compressed by the iPhone’s video pipeline. Downey tried hardware route rigs, gimbals, secondary phones \u2013 and found it unstable. <\/p>\n
“The editing…it was all just too much,” he says. Trimming the post wasn’t a real solution either. The iPhone camera records from a crop of the full sensor, meaning a second crop to that footage for the vertical format leaves creators to work with a fraction of the available image data.<\/p>\n
Downey’s first attempt at creating a solution involved ChatGPT, which he used to experiment with what developers called ‘vibe-coding’, in which the AI \u200b\u200bwas instructed to write functional software through natural language prompts. It didn’t work. <\/p>\n
He closed this project. Months later, they tried again, this time finding that the cloud was the tool that made the difference. Apple’s camera API gives third-party developers access to the full sensor readout, and Downey realized that meant an app could save both horizontal and vertical crops from the same original recording, no resolution loss, no post-processing required. After three to four months of quick engineering, they had a working app.<\/p>\n
This process taught them something about AI tools that many developers have discovered independently: Output requires validation. <\/p>\n
“You would think that because you’re giving this machine a signal it would give you accurate data,” he says. <\/p>\n
“But I found out that’s not the case, so I have to fix it.” Now he doubles and triple audits everything the tool produces before deploying it.<\/p>\n
DualShot Recorder by Downey is a single-paid app, costing $6.99 with no subscriptions or data gathering, meaning all recorded video remains entirely on the phone, and it’s now available in the App Store, where it initially received little attention.<\/p>\n
However, within just 12 hours, it became the leading payment application in the App Store, maintaining its position for eight consecutive days and is now among the top 20 applications in the App Store. The price has increased to $9.99 but the one-time payment option is still intact.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n