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 be quick: start typing the store’s name, pick your card from the results — logo and all — then scan your barcode, done. A proper logo keeps the list 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, and it made an account mandatory where Stocard’s had been optional. I wanted a card wallet, not a storefront.
• SuperCards (built by the original Stocard team) — the closest thing to the old app: free, no ads, no account, even a watch app, and it imports your old Stocard cards. Honestly, it’s the app I’d point most people to. For my own checklist, though, it deliberately skips the two things I cared about most — location-based suggestions and card groups.
• Google Wallet — it does store loyalty cards, and it has since grown up: location-based “nearby pass” notifications and loyalty cards on Wear OS both arrived. But it’s a payments app first — loyalty cards are a secondary citizen, everything is tied to a Google account, and the watch support mirrors your phone rather than being a card app in its own right. I wanted a lean, local-first card wallet, not a feature living inside a payments platform.
• 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 every box at once. SuperCards came closest — private, account-free, even a watch app — but it deliberately drops location and groups, the two things I most wanted. The others each missed more: some weren’t private, some buried my cards inside a payments app, some had no watch app. So I scratched my own itch.

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: your cards on your wrist — synced from the phone on demand, then ready at the checkout without it
• 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 — not as the one true Stocard replacement (SuperCards probably has that covered), just as one more option. If Stocard’s shutdown left you searching too, and location and groups are on your list, 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.