Support

Noraneko recognises a cat by its face, and a cat it has only met once is a cat it has only seen from one angle. Photograph the same animal a few more times, from different sides and in different light, and it gets steadily surer: each cat is matched against its best photograph, so every new one can only help.

Cats photographed from behind, in the dark, or mostly hidden behind a car are the hard cases, and always will be.

Open the photograph on the cat's page and choose Move sighting. It can go to any other cat you have collected, or become a cat of its own. Nothing is lost by getting it wrong first.

Noraneko never merges two cats on its own. When it is unsure it offers what it has and leaves the choice to you.

No, and that is the point rather than a gap. The camera is the only way in.

Every sighting is a small claim: this cat, in this street, at this hour, and you were standing there. That is what a rank is earned against, what puts a pin on the map, what draws a cat's territory, and what the number on a card counts. A photograph from your library cannot support any of it. It could have been taken anywhere, by anyone, in any year.

Open the door to a folder of old pictures and a full collection becomes an afternoon of tapping Import. The walk is the game, and there is no version of this where the walk is optional.

Noraneko can save a copy of each cat to your own photo library if you switch it on in Settings. It writes copies and never reads them back.

Trading takes two devices in the same room, both running Noraneko, and one person scanning the other's code. On a single device the screen opens and waits, because there is nobody to talk to.

If two devices cannot find each other, check that Noraneko is allowed the local network and Bluetooth in the iOS Settings for the app. It uses whichever is available.

Location is optional and always was. Refuse it, or be somewhere with no signal, and the photograph is still kept: it simply has no place attached, and the cat will not appear on the map.

Place names come from Apple Maps, so a sighting recorded with no connection keeps its coordinates and picks up no name.

Settings → Export everything writes your whole library, cats and cards and photographs, to a single file you can put anywhere. On the new device, Replace from a file reads it back, and your name and trading history travel with it.

There is no account and no cloud copy, so this file is the only way across. Nothing is kept anywhere but the device in your hand.

Hey 👋 Stelios here.

Noraneko was built using frontier models.

It is one of my first proper experiments in how quickly I can prototype and release an idea that would otherwise need more time than I can spare. I want to keep shipping apps and catch that now-old feeling of putting something new on the App Store. It used to be far simpler ten years ago.

Everything here is tested, tuned and refactored against what I want the app to do rather than what the model suggests, so you will not find a one-shot vibe-coded app. I am an iOS engineer of fifteen years, so I know what to optimise and what makes an app feel good to use, especially a camera-based one.

If the whole idea still puts you off, I understand.

One last thing: the app will always be free.