Oct 2: what's on Android that the App Store build doesn't have yet
The App Store has build 6. It's the build in the demo video, and it's the one I'm asking judges to use. Google approved Android later, on Sep 30, so the Play build is about a month newer. This is what it has that iOS doesn't have yet:
- Day Care. You check your companion in by scanning the day care's QR code at drop-off, and you hand over a Care Card with allergies, medicines and feeding notes. Staff log the stay as it happens. They get a small floating Care bubble that opens every companion they're looking after.
- Join a household by scanning a QR code. The admin shows the code, and you see which household you're joining before you send the request.
- An honest "you've run out" sheet. When AI credits, scans or portraits run out, the app now tells you which one ran out and whether it comes back. Before, it said "daily reset" for credits that never reset. Packs come first, before any upgrade pitch.
- A rewritten Help Center in all 18 languages, with links that open the screen the article is about.
- You can delete a chat or a scan result.
- A reworked add-companion flow.
- Plain error messages instead of raw network errors. A scan that gets stuck in moderation can now be retried.
- Long galleries scroll smoothly.
Fixes
- The request storm. On Sep 22 and 23, when a session expired, the app kept refetching the same two AI endpoints. That came to about 1,400 requests in 15 seconds. Hundreds of fresh Lambdas started up, the database began refusing connections, and every API returned errors for about a minute. The backend now checks auth before it opens a database connection, so tokenless requests are cheap, and that change is live. The app side is in 1.1.1: it declares the session ended once instead of on every request, and it never retries a 401. The storm came back once on Sep 30, for about five minutes, so the backend change alone isn't enough. The app fix has to reach phones.
- Onboarding answers never saved. The app sent local time without a timezone, and the server rejected every one of those saves. The server accepts it now, so this works on the builds already in the stores.
- Signing out leaves nothing behind. Since July, signing out wipes the app's local data even if the server call fails, and that data is encrypted on the phone, so both store builds already do this. The push registration was the gap: if someone else signed in on the same phone, they could get the previous account's notifications. The server now removes it at sign-out.
What's next
1.1.1 is submitted to Apple. I'm holding its release until judging ends on Oct 13, so the App Store build stays the one in the video. It adds the app-side storm fix and a way to claim a companion by scanning a QR code when someone hands one over to you. Android gets the same update.
Numbers
48 people have signed up so far. One of them started a free trial of Plus Annual on Sep 30. The trial runs for a week and is still active, so revenue is $0 today. If they keep it, it becomes Loonee's first paid subscription around Oct 7.
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