The Pawmanent Record

What if your pet's crimes went on their permanent record? File offenses, good conduct, evidence, and notes... then build their rap sheet and relive their questionable decisions in Year in Crime.

Comment

Every pet has a record.

The Pawmanent Record started with a very serious question:

What if all the ridiculous things our pets do actually went on their permanent record?

I built it during RevenueCat Shipaton after deciding to enter without actually knowing what I was going to make. Less than 24 hours later, I was filing criminal charges against my dog for theft.

That became The Pawmanent Record.

Instead of another pet diary, it treats your pet's behavior like an official case file. You create a record for your pet and file Crimes, Good Conduct, and Suspicious Activity, complete with photographic evidence and Officer's Notes.

Over time, those little incidents become an actual history.

The app calculates things like your pet's most common offense, clean streaks, behavioral statistics, and current status — ranging from relatively reassuring classifications to things like KNOWN MENACE.

Building the case file

I wanted the interface itself to be part of the joke.

Rather than putting the idea inside a conventional mobile UI, I designed the entire app around a physical police dossier. Your pets live in manila case folders. Subjects have file tabs. Their photos are paper-clipped to records. Filing an incident ends with a physical FILED stamp.

The deeper I got into the project, the more important that became. I learned that skeuomorphism works best when it isn't just decoration — the metaphor has to explain how the product works.

Folders contain subjects. Tabs navigate sections. Reports look like reports. Restricted documents are actually stamped RESTRICTED.

One of the biggest design challenges was making all of that feel tactile and playful without making the app frustrating to use. I spent a surprising amount of time tuning paper layers, folder tabs, transitions, spring physics, typography, and tiny interactions so it feels like handling a case file while still behaving like a modern mobile app.

The Year in Crime

My favorite part of the project became Year in Crime.

Instead of making it another statistics screen, I built it as a six-part interactive annual case review.

It walks through the year's record, your pet's modus operandi, their most incriminating Exhibit A, mitigating circumstances, and finally their official disposition.

Depending on the evidence, the final verdict might conclude:

WOULD DO IT AGAIN.

SHOWS REMORSE. BRIEFLY.

Or, in rare cases, that the charges may have been exaggerated.

The whole review can then be turned into a shareable annual case-file poster.

Building with RevenueCat

I wanted the free version to feel like a complete product rather than a demo.

Your pet's record is always yours. Free users can create unlimited subjects, file unlimited incidents, keep their complete history, attach evidence, track their basic statistics, and generate core reports.

Case Files Pro is a one-time lifetime unlock powered by RevenueCat.

It unlocks the deeper analysis and premium case reports, including Monthly Crime Report, Good Conduct Report, Full Rap Sheet, and Year in Crime.

RevenueCat's entitlement system is the authoritative source for Pro access, and pricing comes directly from the App Store or Play Store rather than being hard-coded into the app.

That led to the principle I used when deciding what belonged behind the paywall:

Your record is always yours. Pro unlocks what you can do with it.

What I learned

The biggest lesson was how much polish matters when the product itself is supposed to make someone smile.

The basic incident tracker came together quickly. Making a digital folder feel physical did not.

I rebuilt interactions that technically worked because they didn't feel right. One Year in Crime transition produced a single-frame flash of the next document, barely noticeable in normal use, but enough to break the illusion. I ended up analyzing the animation frame-by-frame and changing the architecture so the outgoing document reveals a blank sheet underneath before the next case file appears.

Those tiny details became some of my favorite parts of the project.

I also learned that monetization doesn't have to mean taking something away from the user. RevenueCat let me build the business model around adding something desirable, deeper analysis and ridiculously elaborate official reports, without holding someone's own data hostage.

What started as a joke about my dog committing crimes turned into one of the most distinctive apps I've built.

And now she has a permanent record to prove it.

Share this project:

Updates

Submission history