The app

What the app is

The app and the website are the same database and the same accounts. What you enter on the phone appears on the site, and the other way round — the app is not a separate copy.

The difference is what each is built for. The phone is for work in the shelter: photographs, short notes, the journal. The site is for longer writing and for shelter administration, where a keyboard is faster.

Installing

The app is not downloaded from Google Play but directly from our site, so Android will ask you a few times whether you are sure. That is expected.

1. Open the link in your invitation and wait for the download to finish.
2. When Chrome asks, confirm that you want to open the downloaded file.
3. If Android says installing from unknown sources is not allowed, grant the permission to Chrome on the screen it offers you, then come back.
4. If Play Protect appears — or MIUI's own check, on Xiaomi phones — choose to install anyway.

None of those warnings means anything is wrong with the app. Android shows them for everything that did not come from Play.

Working offline

Everything you enter is written to the phone first and sent afterwards. With no connection it waits in the send queue and goes on its own as soon as the signal returns.

The queue has its own screen, with a count of what is waiting. While that number is there, nothing is lost — even if you close the app or the phone runs flat.

Do not photograph the same animal again because the first picture “did not go”. Duplicating it makes two posts instead of one.

The camera

A photograph is made smaller on the phone before it is sent — the long edge down to 2400 pixels. That is not a fault and it does not spoil the picture: a full 48-megapixel frame spends a volunteer's mobile data and the site never displays it at that size anyway.

If the phone takes the picture upright, upright is how it stays. The rotation is written into the image itself before sending, so it does not turn up sideways on the site.