CardJar: Loyalty Card Wallet Live

Your loyalty cards, on your phone and on your wrist. No account, no sign-up, and the app sends nothing anywhere. CardJar is a loyalty card wallet that keeps your cards on your device. There is no sign-up screen, because there is nothing to sign up to. No email address, no password, no profile, and no server holding a list of the shops you use. No analytics, no crash reporter, no advertising identifier, and nothing that reports anything back to us. READY AT THE TILL Open, tap, scan. The barcode is drawn to whole device pixels and the screen goes to full brightness, because a fractionally scaled bar edge is a failed scan and a failed scan in a queue is why people give up on loyalty apps. It works in aeroplane mode, because your cards are simply there. Long-press the app icon and your top three cards are right there. ON YOUR WATCH, PROPERLY Wear OS gets a real app and a real tile, not a notification. Star a card on your phone and it is on your wrist, with its own copy of your favourites, so it works with your phone in another room. Your watch shows the card's own colour around the rim so you know which one you are holding up. BRING YOUR CARDS ACROSS Coming from an app that shut down? A folder of screenshots will do. CardJar reads each picture twice — the barcode, and the words printed around it — and matches those words against the retailers it already knows, so your cards arrive with names on them instead of as a list of numbers to type names against. Both readers run on the device: the picture, the words and the name never leave your phone. SHARING THAT ENDS WHEN YOU SEND IT Send a card to your partner and they get a copy to keep. No shared account, no linked state, no sync, nothing to revoke. The card travels inside the part of the link after the # symbol, which browsers never send to a server, so it goes between the two phones and nowhere else. BACKUP THAT IS ACTUALLY YOURS Export your jar as one encrypted file, sealed with a passphrase you choose. Keep it wherever you keep important things. It opens on any phone — a new one, or this one after a wipe — and nobody holds a copy of that passphrase, us included, which is the same fact as nobody else being able to open it. Android's own backup carries your cards across to a new phone as well, from your own Google account or straight over a cable, so setting up a new handset does not start you at zero. CARDS THAT LOOK LIKE YOUR CARDS Your jar shows each shop's own logo on its own colour, so you find a card by recognising it rather than by reading a list of names. Every logo is compiled into the app along with the retailer list. CardJar never fetches one, because asking a server for a shop's logo is telling that server which shops you use. WHAT IT RECOGNISES 508 retailers across the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, Ireland, Germany, Poland, France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands and Ukraine, all compiled into the app — so it never asks a server about a card you hold, and every one of them arrives with its logo already on the tile. Any card that is not on the list still works; it just arrives with its initial on a colour of its own. Barcodes: EAN-13, EAN-8, UPC-A, UPC-E, Code 128, Code 39, Code 93, ITF, Codabar, QR, Data Matrix and Aztec. BEING STRAIGHT WITH YOU CardJar speaks English, German, Polish, Ukrainian, French, Spanish, Italian and Dutch, and follows your phone's language, which you can change in Settings. The watch is still English. PDF417 cards can be scanned and stored, but this version cannot draw them back — the app says so when you add one rather than letting you find out at a till. And a striped barcode on a watch screen is a narrow target for a laser scanner; CardJar warns you once per card instead of pretending otherwise. No analytics. No crash reporter. No advertising identifier. No ads.