It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to call the DualShot Recorder an overnight sensation.
It took only 12 hours from its release to reach number one on the App Store’s list of top paid apps. It was a surprising success — 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 caretaker.
Derrick Downey Jr. made a career out of short-form videos documenting his interactions with the squirrels that visit his patio in LA. Their Instagram and TikTok accounts each have over a million followers (including me) who know well the regular cast of characters: Maxine, Richard, and less frequent but affectionately named visitors like Hoodrat Raymond. Downey takes them to a lot of nuts, a custom-built shelter and a local vet when they need emergency medical care. It’s enjoyable and almost equally healthy.
He was looking to create a series for YouTube, but struggled to find a way to simultaneously capture vertical and horizontal footage. Other producers use a special rig for this involving two phones or cameras shooting simultaneously, or by cropping the clip to both formats in post-processing. “I tried going out and buying different equipment, rigs and gimbals and extra phones… but it just became too cumbersome,” he says. “Editing… it was all too much.” And there are drawbacks to cropping in post: The iPhone camera uses a full sensor crop when you record video. Taking a vertical 16:9 crop from the middle of an already cropped frame means you’re only using a small portion of the total sensor, losing a lot of resolution and limiting your framing options.
Last year he got the idea of creating an app to solve this problem. He’s not a software developer, and has experimented with ChatGPT to try to vibe-code something. It was unsuccessful, so he put the project aside. But earlier this year, something told him to try again, he says.
“I went in the code and the camera activated. And I said OK, we’ve probably got something here.” He did some digging into the capabilities of the iPhone camera to find out what might be possible. Apple’s camera API allows third-party developers to access footage from the entire sensor, which other app developers have taken advantage of in the past. Downey saw an opportunity to use this ability to solve the multiple aspect ratio problem. With this full sensor readout, their 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.
“You would think that because you are giving signals to this machine that it would give you accurate data. But I found that not to be the case…”
The project started with ChatGPT and Downey also tried to use Google’s AntiGravity, but he says the cloud was the tool that really made it possible. And like anyone who works with an AI tool, he learned to deal with its quirks and inaccuracies. “I understand the product I’m trying to build, I understand the functionality and what I’m looking for, and there have been moments when the feedback [Claude gave] Wasn’t accurate,” he says. “You would think that because you’re giving signals to this machine that it will give you accurate data. But I found that’s not the case, so I need to fix it. Acknowledging this, he says he double-checks and triple-audits everything he is asked to do.
He says that as soon as the app was ready, he focused on the process of putting it on Apple’s App Store. It seemed possible. “I thought, OK, let’s put it out there and share it.” They priced it one-time at $6.99, and within its first 12 hours, DualShot Recorder became the number one paid app in the store. Downey states that it remained at the top spot for eight days and is still in the top 20 at the time of this writing.
The response was overwhelmingly positive. The price is $9.99 now, but there’s still no subscription and no user data collected, and the videos stay entirely on your device. The app also includes lots of detailed controls over quality and resolution, and it even lets you record from two different cameras at the same time on the same device. It’s a refreshingly simple value proposition. Downey says that avoiding automated user data collection was important, but that it made bugs harder to identify and fix. He is working on adding a troubleshooting feature so users can send an error report if they encounter a problem.
It’s been a drastic but refreshing change for Downey. “I’m losing a lot of sleep, which doesn’t matter to me,” he tells me. “I’m all about balance, but when something is energizing you, sometimes you lose sleep over it. And that’s what’s going on.” He describes the venture as exciting and giving him a new sense of purpose. But he acknowledges that maintaining a successful app may require some kind of pivot. “There are a lot of new things coming out and I’m embracing it.”
Downey talks openly about his mental health with his followers, and he credits his interactions with his squirrel friends as something that helped him get through dark times. Sometimes when his channel goes quiet, he will share an update that he is not in the right place to make videos. His community is supportive, he says. “They’re saying oh, take your time. We’re not going anywhere. We’ll stay here.”
Wherever the changes he’s embracing take him, Downey says one thing isn’t changing: spending time with squirrels. With the initial “chaos”, as he calls it, of the app launch over, he has been able to get back to devoting time to Richard, Maxine and his other lovely visitors. “They met me in a place when I was going through depression. And that’s family. So even though I’m not able to really show up online like I usually do, I’m still taking care of them.”
<a href