Viral squirrel creator’s app hits No 1 on App Store in 12 hours

Derrick Downey Jr has spent years building a following of over a million people on both Instagram and TikTok by documenting the squirrels that visit his Los Angeles patio, Maxine, Richard, and the occasional drop-in from a character he calls Hoodrat Raymond.

What he did not plan to do was become a solo app developer. That changed when he tried to launch a YouTube series and ran headfirst into a problem that no existing tool solved cleanly.

Creators producing content for both short-form vertical platforms and horizontal YouTube face an uncomfortable choice: buy a second device and rig, or accept the resolution loss that comes from cropping a vertical frame out of footage already compressed by the iPhone's video pipeline. Downey tried the hardware route rigs, gimbals, secondary phones – and found it unsustainable.

"The editing… all of that was too much," he says. Cropping in post wasn't a real solution either. The iPhone camera records from a crop of the full sensor, meaning a second crop into that footage for a vertical format leaves creators working with a fraction of the available image data.

Downey's first attempt to build a solution involved ChatGPT, which he used to experiment with what developers call 'vibe-coding', directing an AI to write functional software through natural language prompts. It didn't work.

He shelved the project. Months later, he tried again, this time finding that Claude was the tool that made the difference. Apple's camera API gives third-party developers access to the full sensor readout, and Downey realised this meant an app could save both a horizontal and vertical crop from a single original recording no resolution loss, no post-processing required. Three to four months of prompt engineering later, he had a working app.

The process taught him something about AI tools that many developers have independently discovered: outputs require verification.

"You would think that because you're giving the prompts to this machine that it would give you accurate data," he says.

"But I found that not to be the case, so I would then have to correct it." He now double and triple audits everything the tool produces before implementing it.

DualShot Recorder by Downey is a single-payment app costing $6.99 without any subscriptions or data gathering, which means that all recorded videos remain completely on the phone itself, and it is now available in the App Store, where it initially received little attention.

However, within just 12 hours, it had become the leading paid application in the App Store, retaining 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 still maintains the one-time payment option.