Why I built RCards

For years my loyalty cards lived in Stocard. It did one thing and did it well: all the plastic from my wallet, in one app, ready at the checkout. Then Stocard was acquired by Klarna, and eventually the app I relied on every week was gone.

So I went looking for a replacement — and ended up writing one instead. This post is about why.

What I actually needed

After years of using a card wallet daily, my checklist was pretty specific:

• Predefined cards. Adding a card should take two taps: pick the store from a catalog, scan the barcode, done — with a proper logo, so the list is scannable at a glance.
• Search. When the queue is moving, I want to type three letters and see my card, not scroll a wall of tiles.
• Location awareness. The app should notice I’m standing in a store and put the right card on top. This was the Stocard feature I missed the most.
• A watch app. Paying at the register with my watch and then digging out my phone for the loyalty card always felt backwards. I wanted the card on my wrist, working even without the phone.

The alternatives I tried

There are plenty of loyalty card apps, and this isn’t a takedown of any of them — they optimize for different things than I needed. These are honest impressions from my search in early 2026; apps change, so treat them as a snapshot, not a verdict.

• Klarna (Stocard’s official successor) — the cards survived the migration, but they now live inside a shopping and payments app. I wanted a card wallet, not a storefront.
• Google Wallet — it stores loyalty cards, but they clearly aren’t the main character next to payments. The interface never clicked for me: adding and finding a card felt like more steps than it should be, and the features from my checklist were either missing or buried deep enough that I never found them.
• Catima — open source and genuinely privacy-first, and I respect it a lot. But when I tried it, it was built around manual entry: no catalog of predefined cards with logos, no location features, and no Wear OS app.
• FidMe and Key Ring — the big established names. Both are capable, but both start with an account and lean into deals, coupons and cashback; measured against my checklist, the wallet part felt secondary, and I never got the offline, local-first simplicity — or the watch experience — I was after.
• Everything else I tried — either wanted an account before showing a single card, or had layouts where my cards felt like the least important thing on the screen.

Nothing ticked all four boxes. Some came close on privacy, some on convenience — none on both, and a watch app that could stand on its own was nowhere to be found.

The other reason: I wanted to build something

There was a second motivation, and I might as well be honest about it: I’m a developer, and I wanted a real project to sharpen my Android skills on — modern stack, Jetpack Compose, Wear OS, the whole thing. A pet project you actually use every day is the best kind of training: you feel every rough edge yourself, and you can’t ship something you’d be annoyed to use at a checkout.

A loyalty card wallet turned out to be the perfect size for that. Small enough for one person to build properly. Big enough to be interesting: camera scanning, a dozen barcode formats, location, background sync, encrypted backups, and a companion watch app that has to work on its own.

What came out of it

The result is RCards — the app I was looking for and couldn’t find:

• Over 1000 predefined cards from retail chains worldwide, downloaded on first launch
• Instant search and custom groups with filtering
• Location-aware: save store locations and the right cards surface when the app opens
• Wear OS app that runs standalone — the phone is only needed to sync cards, on demand
• Offline-first: no internet needed at the store, no account, cards stored locally
• Backups to a local file or a private Google Drive folder, with optional encryption

How it’s funded — an honest note

RCards is free, and the free version is a complete wallet: scanning, search, groups, store locations, offline — everything from my original checklist, for up to 8 cards. It also shows a banner ad.

I thought a lot about whether to ship ads at all. Here’s the honest math: the predefined-cards catalog lives on a server that costs money every month, and the app itself took months of evenings and weekends. A banner in the free version plus an optional Premium subscription is what keeps the project alive without doing anything worse — selling data, or turning a card wallet into a storefront for deals.

Premium (monthly or yearly) removes the banner and unlocks the rest: unlimited cards, the Wear OS app, backup and restore, and appearance customization. If you just need a handful of cards at the checkout, the free version does that job with no strings attached — and either way, your cards stay on your device.

Sharing it with the world

I’ve been using RCards daily for months now, and it quietly does its job — which is all I ever wanted from a card wallet. It turned out well enough that publishing it felt right: if Stocard’s shutdown left you searching too, maybe my checklist matches yours.

RCards is free on Google Play. If you try it and something bugs you — or your favorite store is missing from the catalog — write to me at [email protected]. It’s a one-person project, and feedback genuinely shapes what gets built next.