How the internet’s favorite squirrel dad made the hottest camera app of 2026

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 who know well the regular cast of characters: Maxine, Richard, and Hoodrat Raymond. Downey treats them to plenty of nuts, custom-built shelters, and trips to the local vet when emergency medical care is needed.

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... but it became too taxing," he says. Cropping in post also has drawbacks: the iPhone camera uses a crop of the full sensor when you record video, leading to loss of resolution.

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. While initial attempts failed, he tried again earlier this year. He did some digging into the iPhone camera’s capabilities and found that Apple’s camera API allows third-party developers to access footage from the entire sensor. Downey saw an opportunity to use this to save horizontal and vertical crops from the original video — all in-camera without losing resolution. Three or four months and a lot of prompt engineering later, he had a working app.

Downey says that while he started with ChatGPT, Claude was the tool that really made it possible. He learned to deal with AI's quirks, double-checking and triple-auditing everything. He priced the app at a one-time cost of $6.99 (now $9.99), and it became the number-one paid app in the store within 12 hours, staying there for eight days.

The response was overwhelmingly positive. There’s still no subscription and no user data collected. The app also includes granular controls over quality and lets you record from two different cameras at once. It’s been an invigorating change for Downey, who credits his interactions with squirrels for helping him through dark times. Despite the app's success, he remains dedicated to his furry friends: "They met me in a space when I was going through depression. And that’s family."