Three significant updates shipped today, all focused on improving user experience and infrastructure reliability. Here's what changed and why.
1. NEW PWA Installation Guide Modal
gene46 is a Progressive Web App (PWA) — it can be installed on your smartphone's home screen and used like a native app, with offline support. However, user testing consistently showed that many players didn't know PWA installation was possible, or didn't know how to do it.
Today's update adds a PWA installation guide modal, accessible from the main menu. The modal includes:
- iOS (Safari): Step-by-step instructions with screenshots showing the Share → Add to Home Screen flow.
- Android (Chrome): Instructions for the Chrome install prompt or manual menu → Add to Home Screen.
- Desktop (Chrome/Edge): Instructions for the address bar install icon.
Why This Matters
Installed PWA users have significantly better retention than browser users:
- Faster app launch (no browser chrome, no URL bar).
- Home screen icon = higher return visit rate.
- Service worker caching = works offline and loads faster.
- Full-screen display = better swipe experience on mobile.
Getting more users to install the PWA is one of the highest-impact UX improvements we can make.
2. UPDATE Swipe Label Localization: っぽい / ぽくない
Previously, swipe judgment labels were displayed in English: "LIKE" and "NOPE". User feedback indicated these felt foreign and jarring for Japanese users — the app's primary audience.
Today's update changes the labels to Japanese:
- "LIKE" → "っぽい" (Looks like it / has that quality / I feel it)
- "NOPE" → "ぽくない" (Doesn't have that quality / not feeling it)
Why "っぽい / ぽくない"?
These labels were chosen deliberately over more literal translations of "like" (好き) or "good" (いい) because they capture the evaluative nature of aesthetic judgment more precisely.
When evolving art in gene46, you're not evaluating whether you personally "like" an image in a general sense — you're evaluating whether it "has the quality you're selecting for." The っぽい suffix in Japanese expresses exactly this: "it has that -ness / that quality."
This is analogous to how breeders talk: "this one is very [trait]-ish" — not "I like this one" in an absolute sense, but "this one has the property I'm selecting for."
3. FIX ads.txt & robots.txt Delivery via Cloudflare Workers
gene46 is built as a React SPA (Single Page Application) deployed on Cloudflare Workers. SPAs route all requests through JavaScript, which can cause issues with server-side files that need to be served with specific MIME types and paths.
Two infrastructure files were failing to reach their consumers reliably:
/ads.txt— required by Google AdSense to verify publisher authorization./robots.txt— required by search engine crawlers to understand crawl policy./sitemap.xml— required by Google Search Console to discover all pages.
The fix intercepts these requests at the Cloudflare Worker layer before they reach the SPA router, serving them directly with correct MIME types (text/plain for txt files, application/xml for sitemap.xml).
Why This Matters for AdSense
Google AdSense's crawler verifies ads.txt before serving ads. If ads.txt cannot be reliably fetched at https://yourdomain.com/ads.txt, AdSense marks the publisher as "unauthorized" and may withhold ads. The Cloudflare Workers routing fix ensures ads.txt is served correctly on every request, regardless of SPA routing state.
What's Next
- Google Search Console sitemap processing — waiting for crawler confirmation.
- Blog article indexing — requesting individual URL inspection for all 12 articles.
- Continued AdSense review process — the site now has substantial text content across blog articles and the static SEO layer in index.html.
About the Author
gene46 Development Team
These dev logs document real development decisions and their rationale, including infrastructure challenges that apply to any React SPA deployed on Cloudflare Workers.