Stillcraft / Apps / Paper Trail
It had been raining for three weeks, and the money kept vanishing, not all at once but bit by bit. Paper Trail is a detective's office in a noir town where the client is you. Every spend is a clue, typed in or left on the desk by an informant who reads your bank's notifications. Every category is a suspect with a police photo: the Night Courier, the Box Man, the Barista. When the clues show a pattern, a case opens on a cork board with red thread, and you name the motive and hand down the verdict. No shame, just detective work. Free, no ads, no account, nothing leaves the phone.
Android 9.0+ · Free · English & Русский
Name a monthly sum for living and your payday. The matchbook shows what may still go today: the advance minus known bills, spread over the days to the next fee. There's a match for every day of the period, and the past ones are burnt.
It reads your bank's notifications on the phone, only from apps you mark as banks, and leaves an envelope with the sum and the place. A place a suspect has been to twice sorts itself.
Categories are faces in the files, each police photo drawn in code: the Night Courier, the Box Man, the Barista, the Maître d', the Cabbie, the Dandy, the Croupier. Groceries, rent and the doctor are honest citizens: watched, never prosecuted.
Five patterns: night work after ten, death by small change, a sudden spree, the same weekday every week, and a broken tail. The clues hang on cork, tied with red thread to the suspect's photo.
Tiredness, boredom, a treat, a sale, for company, it was needed. Acquit, or find guilty and set a measure: keep an eye, a monthly tail, a week-long ban. Then the stamp comes down. An acquittal is a solved case too.
Subscriptions are found by themselves: the same sum from the same place every month. Exorcise one when you cancel it, and you'll hear if it comes back. Cash taken out with no trace is a cold case until you remember.
Put leftover money in the safe. A ticket is a savings goal with ten stamp boxes, filled from the safe until it's paid in full.
Each period gets a front page: who was caught and who's at large, the figures, the crime beat, the ghosts in town. At nine, a typed line from the detective's diary sums up the day.
| Face | What it is | Way of working |
|---|---|---|
| The Night Courier | Food delivery | Comes after ten, when there's no strength left to cook |
| The Box Man | Online shops | Comes alive on sale days and at night |
| The Barista | Coffee and snacks | Takes a little, but every day |
| The Maître d' | Restaurants and bars | Fond of Fridays and big tables |
| The Cabbie | Taxis | Works the rain and the mornings you're late |
| The Grocer | Groceries | An honest citizen: you can't do without him |
The informant understands notifications from Russian and English-speaking banks in roubles, dollars, euros, pounds, tenge, hryvnias and more. Anything it can't read, you type in on the typewriter in two taps.
JDK 17+ (Android Studio's bundled JBR works) and the Android SDK. Kotlin, Jetpack Compose, Room, DataStore, WorkManager; the police photos, the cork board and the noir light are drawn in code, and the sounds are synthesised.
git clone https://github.com/bigdevwhale/papertrail.git cd papertrail ./gradlew testDebugUnitTest assembleDebug ./gradlew assembleDebug -Pdemo # app.papertrail.demo: three months of clues, cases and files ./gradlew testDebugUnitTest -Prender --tests '*RenderArt*' # every screen and the faces to PNG
No. An acquittal is as good as a guilty verdict: if the spend was a choice, the case is closed. Honest citizens like groceries and rent are never prosecuted, and your rank grows with cases closed, never with spending less.
No. The informant only reads the notifications your bank already shows on the phone, and only from apps you mark as banks. There's no internet permission at all; nothing leaves the phone.
Then type clues in on the typewriter: an amount, a face, done. Everything else works the same.
When the same sum comes from the same place about a month apart, a ghost appears. Exorcise it once you've cancelled, or let it stay; if an exorcised ghost comes back, you'll be told.
How many Saturdays you have left, and what you'll do with them.
The mindfulness multi-tool: breathing, Wim Hof, a bell, practices and a journal.
A strict focus timer that actually blocks distractions.
Don't drift apart from the people who matter.
Quit a habit, one day at a time.
Turn your days into a quest.
A quiet place for your mind.
Intermittent fasting, made warm and simple.
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Letters to your future self. Sealed until the day comes.
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Chores as spells in a wizard's tower: keep the floors bright, wake the helpers.
A pixel-art familiar that feeds on the pages you read.
Photos and clips struck into pixel-art treasure in a dragon's cave.
A film camera for the family: shoot now, see the prints tomorrow.
They grow up faster than the photos do.
A merry app about death and growing old, in the spirit of the Day of the Dead.
Vows sealed with wax, and a ladder that makes them hard to break.
A scriptorium for what you learn: your own words, fading ink, and memory that holds.
About 940 Saturdays until they're eighteen. Spend them together.
A museum for what you want to remember: dig it up, clean it, put it on show.
Race your own ghost at everyday tasks: splits, medals and the Games.
Intrusive thoughts as ships: the lighthouse beam, the evening watch, forecasts checked.
A magic lantern deals the glass; parent and child make up the bedtime tale.
A date night for two on a night train: a conductor's questions, the phone as the table between you.
The same questions to your child, yourself or a grandparent, year after year, laid as a mosaic.
Your mind is a kite on a string. A few soft tugs a day bring it back to here.
There is too much music. One album a week, a whole side at a time, on a turntable or a tape deck.
There's too much to watch. So nothing gets watched. Your watchlist as a nineties video rental store.
Every date is a quest. The two of you are a party of heroes, and the phone is your game master.
A cosy lucid-dreaming trainer. In a dream, the top never falls.
A cosy pixel-art meditation tracker. Sit still, and shy animals come out.
A valve radio for falling asleep: tune into made-up stations of rain, sea and night trains, and let it drift off the air.
Five pots for everything you've never tried: sow a seed from a catalogue of new things, water it each time you go back, and when it blooms it's yours.
A fridge door for two: the shopping list, whose turn, notes, worries face down and envelopes that open only together. The phones sync at home, with no server.
A pedometer where your steps carry the village post. You are the new postman of a small village by a river, and its letters, stories and seasons go on for years.
Befriend a real tree. Every meeting is a ring: the friendship grows only from visits to the tree itself, and over a year they build up into a sawn cross-section.
Let your wishes age before you buy them. Every urge to buy goes into a bottle on the rack; when it's ripe, you open it without guilt or pour it into the barrel of your real dream.
Every walk is an assignment from the district paper. The editor wires one ordinary thing to shoot, with a twist; you bring back a frame, it's printed as a halftone, and on Sunday the week comes out as an issue.
A diary, index cards, telegrams and letters typed on a typewriter. There's no backspace that erases: a mistake is struck out or painted over and stays on the sheet, so you write slower, and more honestly.
Every shopping trip is a run. You keep a courier office of one: the household orders on the waybill, each shop learns its own shelf order, and every delivered waybill pays in brass tokens for a sign, a bicycle, a van one day.
The things of your hobbies come alive with practice. Every session lights a candle in a little pixel-art Japanese house; a guitar, a ball of yarn or a sourdough starter shivers, opens an eye, steps off the shelf as a house spirit and keeps growing for years.
A little movement all day long instead of an hour twice a week. Nine pixel-art tin toys on a shelf, each a family of movements; a minute or three of squats, balance or breathing winds one up for two hours and puts a pin in the day's music-box drum.
Make friends the way it actually works, and keep them for years. An old sea chart of your people: small sorties of courage to meet them, bridges that grow with every hour together, and fog that rolls in when you stop.
Step out of your comfort zone a little every day. Your fears become circus acts: pick what you find hard, and the bill offers three small real-life numbers a day, from warm-up to premiere — with a drum roll before and applause after.
Over a thousand evidence-graded protocols for a longer, calmer, happier life. Your body is a blueprint with eight systems; every protocol is a mod you try on yourself for 14 days, and the lab shows whether it moved anything before it enters your firmware.
Someone already lives in your flat. Find out who — and help them leave. A slow, quiet haunting on your own photos: marks in your rooms, notes in the evening, words through the static, and after two weeks one real thing left to do.
A small present every day, from your past self. You can't surprise yourself unless you forget: fill a capsule machine with little presents for future days, let the words seal, and turn the crank for one a day.
A pilgrim's pass: come to a place of power, a church, a mosque, a synagogue, a spring or an old tree, sit there ten minutes without the phone, and the book gets a stamp nobody else has.
A book of hours for your own practices: the day divided into hours by the sun, a bell for each, and whatever you put into them written into an illuminated manuscript.
Be drawn one of the 117 billion people who have ever lived, and read their life in a parish register: the doors that were open, the ones that were shut, and what was left behind.
Enamel pin badges for the small deeds of a day, each with an order typed out, a rubber stamp and a fanfare. Nothing to plan and no streaks: in the evening the commission asks what happened.
Put a worry on an old brass balance as a stone, and weights with arguments go on the other pan, one by one, until it tips. 1,209 concrete worries, 15,900 weights.
A pet that lives under your bed and eats fear. Horror films and books feed it, anxious news is fast food, and your own fears it guards at night.
A bookshop of books that don't exist. Every day a customer asks for one, and you find it on the shelf by writing its title, first line and blurb.
Tarot with no bad cards. The Auntie finds the good even in Death, gives you an omen for the day and asks in the evening whether it came true.
A pocket field guide to the spirits of your real houseplants. Catch them with the camera; they live by the real sun over your town, ask you to touch the soil, grow, hatch from cuttings and fight real pests.
A talk by the fire with the people close to you: hold your stones together, and sparks bring the questions.
A diary of the cafés you keep coming back to: each gets a page and a sugar packet, and every cup leaves a coffee stain on the page.
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