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The Client Paid Me $30 for a Small Mobile App Bug That Took 4 Hours
Two completely different problems. One broken build, one app that crashed on a real device. Finding the real cause took far longer than fixing it.
I accepted what looked like one of the easiest freelance jobs of the week. The client said their React Native application had stopped working after updating a few packages and asked if I could fix it. They believed it was a simple dependency issue, offered $30, and expected the project to be ready within a few minutes. Since I had solved similar problems many times before, I accepted without hesitation.
That confidence disappeared almost immediately.
The project didn’t even build. After finally getting the build to succeed, the application still crashed on a real Android device with a confusing Java exception. What looked like one bug turned out to be two completely different problems hiding behind each other. Those four hours reminded me that the hardest part of debugging isn’t writing code. It’s figuring out which problem you’re actually solving.
Here’s exactly what happened.
