Engineering notes from Aermes: on-device ML, React Native internals, and the occasional production war story.
What iOS 26 background tasks actually do
BGContinuedProcessingTask lets user-started work keep running after the user leaves, with a system progress banner. We measured on real iPhones what gets it suspended, expired or shown as "Failed", and packaged the rules as @aermes/expo-continued-task.
Finding trips in a camera roll with on-device CLIP
How Aermes segments trips from a photo library entirely on-device: an int8 CLIP ViT-B/32 over ONNX, zero-shot junk detection with no text encoder, and the 994 MB we almost left resident.