How the internet’s favorite squirrel dad made a hit camera app

It’s not hyperbole to call DualShot Recorder an overnight sensation.

It took only 12 hours from the time it was released to hit number one on the App Store’s list of top paid apps. It was a surprise 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. built a career on short-form videos documenting his interactions with the squirrels that visit his patio in LA. His Instagram and TikTok accounts each have well over a million followers (myself included) who know well the regular cast of characters: Maxine, Richard, and less frequent but affectionately named visitors 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 delightful and about as wholesome as it gets.

He was looking to spin up a series for YouTube, but he struggled to find a way to capture vertical and horizontal footage simultaneously. Other creators solve for this by using a special rig with two phones or cameras shooting at once, or by cropping the clip to both formats in post-processing. “I tried going out and buying different devices and rigs and gimbals, and additional phones to set up to accommodate for that… but it became too taxing,” he says. “The editing… all of that was too much.” And cropping in post has drawbacks, too: the iPhone camera uses a crop of the full sensor when you record video. Taking a vertical 16:9 crop from the middle of that 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 to try creating an app to solve the problem. He’s not a software developer, and experimented with ChatGPT to try and vibe-code something. This was unsuccessful, so he put the project to the side. But earlier this year, something told him to try again, he says.

“I went into the code and the camera activated. And I said okay, we possibly got something here.” He did some digging into the iPhone camera’s capabilities 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 capability to solve the multiple aspect ratio problem. With this full sensor readout, his app could save horizontal and vertical crops from that original video — all in-camera without losing resolution. Three or four months and a lot of prompt engineering later, he had a working app.

The project started with ChatGPT, and Downey tried using Google’s Antigravity as well, but he says that Claude was the tool that really made it possible. And like anyone who has worked with AI tools, he learned to deal with its quirks and inaccuracies. “I understand the product that I’m trying to create, I understand the functionality and what I’m looking for, and there have been moments when the response [Claude gave] wasn’t accurate,” he says. “You would think that because you’re giving the prompts to this machine that it would give you accurate data. But I found that not to be the case, so I would then have to correct it.” Recognizing that, he says he double checks and triple audits everything he asks it to do.

With the app ready, he says he looked into the process of putting it on Apple’s App Store. It seemed doable. “I was like, alright, well let’s just put it on there and share it.” He priced it at a one-time cost of $6.99, and within its first 12 hours, DualShot Recorder became the number-one paid app in the store. It remained in that top spot for eight days, Downey recounts, 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 videos stay entirely on your device. The app also includes plenty of granular controls over quality and resolution, and it also lets you record from two different cameras on the same device at once. It’s a refreshingly simple value proposition. Downey says that it was important to refrain from automatic user data collection, but that has made it harder to pin down and fix bugs. He’s working on adding a troubleshooting feature so users can send an error report when they encounter problems.

It’s been an overwhelming but invigorating change for Downey. “I’ve been losing a lot of sleep, which I don’t mind, really,” he tells me. “I’m all about balance, but when something is fueling you, sometimes you lose sleep over it. And that’s what’s been going on.” He describes the venture as exciting, and giving him a new sense of purpose. But he acknowledges that maintaining a successful app might call for a pivot of some kind. “It’s a lot of new things coming up, and I’m embracing that.”

Downey is open about his mental health with his followers, and he credits his interactions with his squirrel friends as something that helped lift him out of a dark time. At times when his channel has gone quiet, he’ll share an update that he’s not in the right space to create videos. His community is supportive, he says. “They’re like oh, take your time. We’re not going anywhere. We’ll be here.”

Wherever the change that he’s embracing takes him, Downey says that one thing isn’t changing: spending time with the squirrels. With the initial “chaos” as he calls it dying down from the app launch, he’s been able to get back to dedicating time to Richard, Maxine, and his other furry visitors. “They met me in a space when I was going through depression. And that’s family. So even if I really haven’t been able to show up online like I usually do, I’m still taking care of them.”