What is Petable? The app where the real photo is the collectible

Petable is a free social app and collection game about the real animals you meet outside. You’re walking somewhere ordinary — a corner shop, a campus path, the street you take every day — and you see a cat folded up on a warm scooter seat. In Petable, you open the camera, take a photo from a kind distance, and that real photo becomes your collectible. It joins a living map of your neighbourhood, fills a slot in your city’s Petadex, and — if nobody has ever met this particular animal before — earns you a permanent First Finder crown.

That’s the whole game. No energy timers, no daily caps, no packs to buy. The only limit is how many animals the world puts in front of you.

How does Petable work?

The loop has four steps, and you can learn them in one walk:

• Spot. Open the camera when you meet an animal. Petable verifies there’s a real animal in frame — no gallery uploads, no internet photos, no fakes.
• Collect. Your photo becomes a Find Card: matted like a postcard, named in handwriting, stamped with the date. The real moment is the treasure — Petable never replaces your photo with generated art.
• Map. Your find joins the community map as a fuzzy pin. Exact locations stay private, always — roughly 200 metres of deliberate blur protects both the animals and the people who spot them.
• Share. Any find can become a postcard for the friend who’d get it — the one who also stops for every cat.

What makes an animal “yours”?

Nothing — and that’s deliberate. Street animals belong to themselves. What you can be is a First Finder: the first person ever to spot an individual animal on Petable. When someone else meets the same cat next week, Petable recognises it’s the same individual, and their photo joins the animal’s shared gallery and roam map. Your crown stays on its profile forever, and you get the small, genuinely lovely notification that the animal you found is still out there being seen.

What is the Petadex?

The Petadex is the sticker album at the heart of the collecting side: every species and breed in your area, filled slot by slot. There’s a personal view (what you have found) and a city view (what your whole community has found together). Unspotted entries stay as gentle silhouettes, so there’s always something left to find. We wrote a whole post about it — What is a Petadex?

Is Petable really free?

Yes. Spotting, collecting, the map, the Petadex, badges, sharing — all of it is free, for everyone, with no gates. Petable is built by people who wanted this app to exist, not a funnel toward a paywall. The launch-limited collectibles that early spotters earn are cosmetic thank-yous; they have no price tag and never will.

What about the animals?

The game is designed so the kindest behaviour is also the winning behaviour. You never need to touch, feed, chase, or corner an animal — a photo from a respectful distance counts exactly the same. First awards go to the first safe spotter, never the fastest or the closest, and captures that involve unsafe behaviour don’t earn anything at all. If you want the full ethic, it’s in our Community Guidelines — the short version is: spot kindly, keep distance, respect the animal.

When can I play?

Petable is coming to iOS and Android, and beta testing opens soon. The waitlist is open now — early spotters shape the first cities, name the first animals, and earn collectibles nobody else will ever get. More curiosities are answered on the FAQ.

Because every animal is Petable — worth noticing, remembering, and respecting.