Kaka Camera 1.6 is out now, and before we forget how it got here, we wanted to write down the early history while the commits are still warm. The first commit is dated November 27, 2025. Five months and four releases later, the app is a different product from the one we started. This is the reconstruction, release by release.
1.0 (late November 2025): a prompt stream with a wallet
The first version was a React Native app built with Expo, and its scope was narrow on purpose: a waterfall stream of prompt templates, a detail screen where you edited the template's interactive tags, a task list for your generations, and a points wallet with settings. The first two weeks were spent wiring the app to the real API, adding search, and rebuilding the prompt detail screen around interactive tags — the idea that a template is not a wall of text but a sentence with a few words you are meant to swap.
Two decisions from those weeks still shape the app. Templates are written so the prompt sent to the AI stays in precise English while the editable labels appear in the user's own language — quality for the model, clarity for the person. And every generation is paid in points, deducted up front, with the cost shown before you confirm.
1.1 (December 26, 2025): purchases, share links, and Android
December was the month the app became something you could pay for and share. Mid-month brought in-app purchases on StoreKit 2 — recharge packages, order history, and a few humbling rounds of fixing verification in release builds, plus a crash caused by deep-link initialization that only existed outside the debugger. On December 8 the app learned languages: the interface gained a language switcher, and prompts started travelling with language headers so content follows the user.
On December 19 we shipped deep links with a signed share hash, wired through iOS universal links and Android app links. That is the mechanism behind the share pages on this site: a template or task link opens in the app when it is installed, and in a browser when it is not — with the shared content waiting for you after you sign in. The same week added the in-app user guide, proper toast notifications, and a sort filter for the prompt stream.
Four days before the release, Android support landed together with age verification at registration. The 1.1.0 build itself — December 26 — added the discount system, the first version of task versioning, and the compliance work App Review asked for. If 1.0 proved the idea, 1.1 was the first version we pointed strangers at.
1.3 (January 13, 2026): the marketplace becomes real
The first week of January was dense. Points history arrived on January 6, along with prompt auto-optimization. On January 7 alone we shipped dynamic quality levels — delivered by the API in groups instead of hard-coded in the app — registration promotions, and a change to the marketplace's economics: copyright fees now start at 10 points per use, with 20 as the suggested default. The intent was to lower the barrier to publishing; a fee that small is easy to say yes to, and authors still earn on every use.
Registration gained email verification on January 13, the same day we bumped the iOS build to 1.3. Publishing a completed task as a template and listing a template's versions both date from this period — the loop of “use a prompt, get a result, sell the prompt” was closed.
1.4 (January 19, 2026): the Toolbox
On January 14 we did two things at once: upgraded the foundation — Expo SDK 51 to 54, React Native 0.74 to 0.81 — and added the Toolbox tab with three utilities that have nothing to do with AI: an image resizer for exact pixel dimensions, a collage maker for up to nine photos with drag-to-reorder, and an image splitter that cuts one picture into a social-feed grid. They cost no points and need no account, and they exist because people kept asking for them next to the AI features rather than in a separate app.
The rest of the 1.4 cycle was polish: the collage maker learned drag and resize, and the translation effort reached the login screens, the Toolbox, and the prompt detail page. The version bump to 1.4.0 on January 19 sealed it.
What we took from it
Looking at the timeline, the pattern is that every release added one way to start and one way to finish. 1.0: templates in, tasks out. 1.1: money in, shared links out. 1.4: your own photos in, grid tiles out. Version 1.6 — covered in its own post — is the biggest expression of the same idea: a camera in, and a marketplace that tells you exactly what your points buy.
The full feature walkthrough lives in the user guide, and the thinking behind task versioning gets its own deep-dive in Every image is a version.