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Quickly record your pet’s daily activities, condition, and care with simple taps.
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Choose your style — Light or Dark mode.
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Quickly record your pet’s daily activities, condition, and care with simple taps.
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From everyday habits to little changes, keep a lasting record of your cat’s life and memories.
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Quickly record your pet’s daily activities, condition, and care with simple taps.
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A simple way to look back on your pet’s days, memories, and journey together.
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Keep track of daily care and health changes, so every small sign and precious moment is remembered.
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Inspiration I wanted to build a small time machine for the days we spend with our pets. I have pets of my own, and between work and everyday life, the little moments disappear surprisingly quickly — an ordinary walk, a funny habit, the sound of a bark or meow, the days when they were young and energetic. And someday, those ordinary moments may become the ones we most want to return to. So I wanted recording them to be almost effortless: a photo, a few taps, maybe a short voice recording. Something simple enough to use today, but meaningful enough that years later, you can open an old date and remember not only what your pet looked like, but what that day felt and sounded like. I also wanted the timeline to continue into their senior years and periods of home care. Those quieter and sometimes harder days are still part of the same life, and I don't think they deserve to disappear from the story.
A note on how this came together I'm a Japanese single mother, and my day job is architectural visualization — I'm not a professional app developer. I first discovered Shipaton through an Instagram ad and thought, almost casually, "Maybe I could do this." So I tried. English has never been my strong suit, and building an app like this was completely outside my usual field. AI became my sounding board throughout the process: not replacing the idea or making the decisions for me, but helping me question them, test them, find problems, and turn what was in my head into something real. This app was built solo, but not without conversation. That experience became part of the project itself: sometimes technology doesn't replace what a person can do — it expands what they can attempt.
What it does Pet Walk Diary lets you record everyday life with a dog or cat in just a few taps. Add up to two photos, choose tags describing what happened — pulling on the leash, sniffing around, rolling over, meeting a friend and more — and the app creates a short diary-style line in a tone matched to the pet. You can also record audio, so a bark, a meow, or another small sound from that day can remain attached to the memory. Each entry becomes a diary card containing the photos, activity, steps and an optional note from the owner. Entries appear on a monthly calendar, with an audio icon on days that contain a recording, so an old date can become a doorway back to that day. Pet Walk Diary also includes a separate Care mode for senior pets, pets recovering from illness, or pets receiving home care. Instead of walk-oriented tags, it includes things such as meals, medication, elimination, rest and mood, with gentler diary language. I didn't want the timeline to stop when walks became shorter. The energetic years and the care years belong to the same life.
Memories should belong to the owner This became one of the most important principles of the app. Photos are not kept only inside Pet Walk Diary; they can also be saved to the device gallery. Diary data and photos can be exported manually, providing another path beyond the device's automatic backup. Because an app designed to preserve memories should not become the reason those memories are lost. If someone is going to cry over this app someday, I would rather it be because they opened an old diary entry — not because their data disappeared. The paid tier also allows a month of memories to be exported as a PDF calendar. I chose PDF deliberately. I didn't want users to depend on one printing company, one country, or even this app forever. A PDF can be kept, shared, printed at home, or taken to a printing service wherever the owner lives. The memories can leave the app. They belong to the person who made them.
How I built it Pet Walk Diary is a solo-built Flutter app for Android, available in Japanese and English and designed for dogs, cats, and care situations. Diary text is template-based rather than generated by an LLM for every entry. Different pools of phrases are used depending on the selected tags and mode, allowing the app to feel personal while remaining fast, predictable, inexpensive to operate, and usable without sending every diary entry to an AI service. The app integrates camera and gallery input, image cropping, audio recording and playback, step sensing, local data storage, image sharing, PDF calendar generation, data export, light/dark mode support, and RevenueCat purchases and entitlement restoration. Template content can also be updated remotely through JSON, with built-in phrases used as a fallback if the remote data cannot be reached.
Challenges I ran into The biggest challenge was RevenueCat itself, ironically. My Google Play service account credentials failed validation for more than a week. Eventually I discovered that I had been configuring Google Cloud under the wrong Google account. Switching accounts and enabling the correct APIs finally turned the credentials green. Then purchases began returning "already owned" while RevenueCat had nothing to restore. The cause was a stale Google Play cache left behind by an auto-refunded license-tester purchase. And after solving that, purchases succeeded but the paid features still wouldn't unlock. The Google Play product existed in RevenueCat, but I had not actually attached it to the entitlement. Each problem looked like a separate failure until I understood how the pieces connected. Debugging the entire purchase flow end to end as a solo developer taught me more about how real app infrastructure fits together than simply following a tutorial ever could.
Pet Walk Diary is not really about recording walks. It's about keeping a way back. We can't stop our pets from growing older. But maybe we can keep a few more doors open to the days we shared with them.
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