I'm Hardik — oddlyspaced most places. 11 years in mobile, most of it in native Android before I ever touched React Native. That order matters: it's why this kit respects the platform underneath instead of pretending it isn't there.
Agents write plausible screens. They get the platform wrong — the entitlement check that runs only on the device, the permission string that fails review, the webhook that applies twice. I've fixed those enough times to encode them.
Custom ROMs, Magisk modules, Smali patching. I learned the platform by taking it apart before I ever shipped anything on it. That habit never left — there are still C and reverse-engineering repos on my GitHub next to the app code.
Native Android as a job: Kotlin, Java, the real constraints of apps people actually use. Twenty-two of my public repos are Kotlin. This is where I learned that the hard part of mobile is never the UI — it's the platform underneath it.
Moved to React Native for product velocity and immediately hit its ceiling. So I went through it rather than around it. Three of my commits are in React Native core — two of them Android accessibility features, because the platform gaps that bother me are the ones users feel. I also build Turbo Modules, and gave a talk on putting Headout's bookings into iOS Spotlight from a Swift module.
I built an MCP server so an LLM could drive a real Android device. Watching agents work on mobile codebases showed me the actual failure mode: they write plausible screens and get the platform wrong. Nativestarter is the answer to that.
No numbers on this page. Open the repositories instead.
Lets an LLM automate a connected Android device or emulator — taps, input, screenshots, logs. Built before agent tooling for mobile was a category.
A screen-time app that interrupts you with an Ashneer Grover meme. My most-starred project, and it got picked up by the press.
Reverse-engineered Zomato's app to build an iOS-style live Activity Indicator for order tracking on Android. Wrote up how.
A Swift Turbo Module that indexes Headout bookings into iOS Spotlight, with previews. The talk demos are open source.
A lightweight, Figma-inspired blur view for React Native. Published to npm.
Driver work for the LEDs on the back of the Nothing Phone (1), written from the aw210xx datasheet.
Reverse-engineered the USB configuration protocol for the Royal Kludge RK61 keyboard so it could be configured from Linux.
A bare-metal Raspberry Pi 4 OS in C that prints over UART. No kernel, no libc.
I answer my own email. If you want to know whether this fits what you're building, just ask — I'll tell you honestly if it doesn't.
hardik@nativestarter.io