Errands · Lists · Reminders

Remember what you need, when you can actually do it.

Most reminder apps ask you when you want to be reminded. PickUp Note asks a harder question: under what real conditions could this errand actually be finished — near the right shop, before you leave the house, while it is still open? You answer that once, in plain conditions you choose yourself, and the app does the rest on your phone. It works with no account and no server: install it, write your lists, and none of it leaves the device.

See what it does Read the privacy policy

Nothing has been submitted to a store yet, so there is nothing to install today. What that means.

The Now screen. One card at a time, each with the reasons it is being shown, and a bar that says how sure the app is — drawn from the screen as built.

Where the work happens

Sharing a list with your household, keeping an encrypted backup and moving to a new phone are what need our server, and each of them is something you switch on. Three lookups go through it when you ask for one — a barcode, the weather, a place — and buying something is checked with Apple or Google. Everything else works with the phone in aeroplane mode.

The product

What it actually does

Errands and lists that stay on your phone. Write them, tick them off, keep them.
Reminders tied to conditions rather than clock times. “When I am near a supermarket”. “While the chemist is still open”. “In the half-hour before my next meeting”.
Places you save yourself. Name your usual supermarket once and errands tagged for it can surface when you arrive.
A shared shopping list for the household. When someone buys the milk it is marked bought on everyone’s phone, and the pending reminders for it are withdrawn — so nobody buys it twice and nobody is pinged about it afterwards.
Scan a barcode to tick something off. An exact match ticks straight through; a probable one asks you first; an unrecognised barcode can be named once and is recognised after that.
Where you parked. Saved when you ask for it, kept on the phone, never uploaded.
Quiet by design. Quiet hours, a daily cap, per-category caps, cooldowns and duplicate suppression are built in. PickUp Note would rather say nothing than say something useless.

A shared list, drawn as built. Maria has said she will get the milk; Alex has already bought the butter. Nobody had to tell anybody.

Shared lists

When someone buys the milk, everyone’s phone knows.

One list, everyone in the household, and two ways to keep out of each other’s way: claim an item to say you are getting it, or just buy it. Either way the pending reminders for that item are withdrawn on everyone’s phone, so nobody is pinged about milk that is already in a bag.

Changes are written on your phone first and confirmed afterwards — the badge in the corner is the app telling you which is which, rather than pretending the network is always there.

How it decides

No AI. Rules you can read.

PickUp Note contains no artificial intelligence and no machine learning. There is no model, nothing is trained on what you write, and nothing about you is scored or profiled. A reminder appears because the deterministic rules you set up were all true at the same time, and for no other reason.

Which means it can show its working. Tap “Why now?” on any suggestion and every condition that contributed is listed as a complete sentence, with its state. When a condition cannot be checked, it is unknown — and unknown is never quietly treated as true.

You write the conditions, and the app reads them back to you as one plain sentence. This errand comes up near a pharmacy, while it is open, in the two days before it is due.

And afterwards it shows its working: every condition that contributed, written out, with no score and nothing to interpret.

Conditions are sentences, not settings

when you’re within 500 m of a pharmacy
while the place is open
when it’s snowing
when rain is at least 60% likely
on Thu
while you’re walking

Six real ones, exactly as the app writes them. You pick the pieces; the app does the joining up.

Before you leave the house is the honest exception. A phone cannot reliably tell the moment you leave: the operating system often notices you have crossed your own doorstep once you are already down the road. So PickUp Note uses the earlier signals it actually has — a calendar event with a place, a departure time you set yourself — and treats the doorstep as a fallback. It does not claim to catch you on the way out.

Unknown is a real answer

When it does not know, it says so

Weather conditions need a weather source, and severe-weather warnings need a warning feed configured for your country. Where one is not available, PickUp Note says it does not know, rather than telling you everything is clear. A fabricated all-clear is the one mistake here with a cost attached, so the app refuses to make it.

The same rule holds throughout. A shop whose opening hours nobody has recorded does not become “open”; it becomes unknown. A condition the app cannot evaluate does not fire a reminder, and does not pretend to be false either.

The reminder itself

Short, and never more than it should be.

A reminder is the errand’s own title and one line. The reason is not in the notification and nothing else from your list is either — if you want to know why it came now, that is what the “Why now?” button is for.

And plenty of reminders never arrive at all, on purpose. Quiet hours, a daily cap, per-category caps and cooldowns can all hold one back. Every decision the app makes — sent or held back — is written down with its reason, and you can read the list.

Why didn’t it remind me?

Drawn from the code that builds it. Those three buttons are the three it has.

Privacy

Privacy is the architecture, not the pitch

PickUp Note keeps no continuous location history. It knows the places you saved yourself and, separately, where you parked. There is no timeline of your movements — not on the phone, not on our server.
No ads, no advertising identifier, no cross-app tracking. The app asks for none and contains none.
This version contains no analytics and no crash reporting. That is a decision, not an omission, and this website carries none either.
Camera frames never leave the device. A barcode is decoded on the phone and the picture is discarded.
Calendar contents are read on the phone and never uploaded.
Backups are encrypted before they are uploaded, with a key we do not hold. We cannot read them — and cannot recover one for you.

The privacy policy says all of this again in the detail a regulator would want, including the parts that are less flattering.

What it costs

Free to use. No subscription.

PickUp Note is free to use, and the free version is a real product rather than a trial — personal lists, reminders, parking and a shared shopping list for the household are in it. Larger features will be one-time purchases.

There is no subscription, and there will not be one. Prices are not settled yet; the stores will show them before you agree to anything.

Weather, place and product information comes from other organisations, so those lookups carry fair-use limits. Everything PickUp Note does by itself does not.

Getting it

Not out yet, and we are not pretending otherwise.

PickUp Note is not in the App Store or Google Play yet. Nothing has been submitted, so there is nothing here to download and no list to join. When it is published, the links will be here:

App Store: [TO BE COMPLETED: App Store listing URL]
Google Play: [TO BE COMPLETED: Google Play listing URL]

Questions in the meantime go to support, which has the contact address and the answers to the things people ask first.