It’s not hyperbole to call the DualShot Recorder an overnight sensation.
It took only 12 hours from the time of its release to hit number one on the App Store’s top paid apps list. It’s been a surprising success — but even more surprising is the app’s origin story: it all started with a group of local squirrels who befriended their favorite caretaker.
Derrick Downey Jr. has built a career on short videos documenting his interactions with the squirrels that visit his LA patio. Her Instagram and TikTok accounts each have over a million followers (including me) who know the regular characters well: Maxine, Richard, and rare but affectionately named guests like Hoodrat Raymond. Downey treats them to plenty of nuts, custom-built shelters, and trips to the local vet when emergency medical care is needed. It’s fun and about as healthy as it gets.
He was looking to film a YouTube series, but struggled to figure out how to shoot vertical and horizontal images at the same time. Some creators solve this by using a special rig with two phones or cameras shooting at the same time, or by cropping the clip into both formats during processing. “I tried to go out and buy different tools and instruments and instruments, and additional telephones that I could arrange to deal with that… but it was too taxing,” he said. “The planning … all of that was too much.” And post cropping has its drawbacks, too: the iPhone camera uses a full sensor crop when recording video. Taking a straight 16:9 crop from within that already cropped frame means you’re using less of the sensor overall, losing a lot of clarity and limiting your framing options.
Last year, he got the idea to try to make an app to solve the problem. He is not a software developer, and experimented with ChatGPT to try and code the vibe with something. This did not work, so he put the project aside. But earlier this year, something told him to try again, he says.
“I entered the code and the camera worked. And I said okay, we’ve got something here.” He did some digging into the iPhone’s camera capabilities to find out what’s possible. Apple’s camera API allows third-party developers to access images from every 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, his app can preserve horizontal and vertical crops from that original video — all in-camera without losing resolution. Three or four months and a lot of quick engineering later, he had a working app.
“You’d think that because you’re giving this machine commands it’s going to give you accurate data. But I’ve found that’s not the case…”
The project started with ChatGPT, and Downey tried using Google’s Antigravity, but says Claude is the tool that really made it happen. And like anyone who has worked with AI tools, he learned to deal with its challenges and inaccuracies. “I understand the product I’m trying to create, I understand the work and what I want, and there have been times when the answer has been [Claude gave] you were incorrect.” “You would think that because you give this machine a command it will give you accurate information. But I found out it wasn’t, so I’ll have to fix it.” With that in mind, he says he double-checks and triple-checks everything he asks her to do.
Now that the app is ready, he says he’s looking into the process of putting it on Apple’s App Store. It seemed possible. “I was like, okay, let’s put it out there and share it.” He priced it at a one-time price of $6.99, and in its first 12 hours, DualShot Recorder became the best paid app in the store. It stayed at that top spot for eight days, Downey recounts, and is still over 20 at the time of writing.
The response was overwhelmingly positive. The price is $9.99 now, but there is no registration and no user data is collected, and the videos stay completely on your device. The app includes more granular controls over quality and resolution, and allows you to record from two different cameras on the same device at the same time. It’s a refreshingly simple value proposition. Downey says it was important to opt out of automatic user data collection, but that made it difficult to pin and fix bugs. He is working on adding a troubleshooting feature so users can submit a bug report when they encounter problems.
It’s been a big but encouraging change for Downey. “I’ve been losing sleep, which I don’t care about,” he tells me. “I have balance, but when something is fueling you, sometimes you lose sleep over it. And that’s what happened.” He describes the business as exciting, and it gives him a new sense of purpose. But he admits that maintaining a successful operating system may require a pivot of some sort. “There’s a lot of new things coming, and I welcome that.”
Downey is open about his mental health with his fans, and credits his interactions with his squirrel friends as something that helped him get through a dark time. Sometimes when his channel is quiet, he will share an update that he is not in the right space to create videos. He says his community supports him. “They said, take your time, we’re not going anywhere, we’ll be there.
Wherever change takes him, Downey says one thing never changes: spending time with squirrels. With the first “chaos” as he calls it since the launch of the app, he was able to return to devoting time to Richard, Maxine, and his other furry guests. “They met me in the space when I was depressed. And that’s family. So even if I couldn’t come online like I usually do, I still take care of them.”
