Frequently asked questions

What is Catima’s business model? How does it make money?

Catima is a hobby project made to give users a way to store loyalty cards and other barcode-based cards without having their private data sold. It is fully offline and doesn’t send your data to any server. Please be aware that Google will make encrypted backups of apps on their servers by default.

Making money is not a goal of the Catima project. Giving users a privacy-friendly alternative to other loyalty card apps is.

Do you accept donations?

Yes. You can make a donation to show your appreciation for the project.

How long does it take for an update to be available on F-Droid / Google Play?

An APK file for every update is published to GitHub Releases and submitted to Google Play (and automatically detected by IzzyOnDroid and F-Droid). Below is the list of “app stores” sorted by how fast they update.

IzzyOnDroid

The fastest option is IzzyOnDroid.

IzzyOnDroid scans GitHub Releases once a day and instantly publishes the new version. The delay will be less than 24 hours.

F-Droid

The second fastest option is F-Droid.

F-Droid builds Catima from the publicly available source code and runs several scripts over it to ensure it is completely Open Source. An app update tends to be available between 3 and 6 days after release.

Google Play

The slowest option is Google Play. The reason for this is two-fold.

The first part of the reason is that there are many Google Play users and most of them need a lot more handholding and are a lot less patient and kind than F-Droid and IzzyOnDroid users. So, to prevent my mailbox from exploding if I ever accidentally release a buggy version I only roll it out to 10% of users per day.

The second part is that Google’s review process is very inconsistent in speed, sometimes they review within 24 hours, other times they take very long. Currently, the longest they have taken to review an update is 16 days (as of October 7th, 2022).

I don’t like the new version, how do I downgrade?

Every release ever made is available on GitHub Releases. Choose the version you want and download the attached .apk file.

Do note that Android does not allow downgrading apps and requires you to uninstall the current version you have installed. To prevent data loss, make sure you export your database before your uninstall.