Cadge: Virtual Pet Widget

Cadge is a virtual pet that lives on your home screen. Feed it straight from the widget without opening the app, and watch a Blob become a Sprout and then a Cadgling with a personality you accidentally trained. THE WIDGET IS THE APP Two widget sizes, and both of them have a working Feed button. Feeding from the home screen runs exactly the same path as feeding inside the app: the same daily allowance, the same cost, the same result. Tap the pet instead and it opens the room. A PERSONALITY YOU DIDN'T CHOOSE Five traits (chaos, clinginess, sass, sleepiness and curiosity) move with how you actually play. At the Cadgling stage the dominant one sets in for good: chaotic, clingy or sassy. Two people who both fed their pet every single day can still end up with completely different creatures. CARE IS ALWAYS FREE Three feeds a day cost nothing. Petting costs nothing. A Treat costs one Snack, and Snacks are earned by turning up. There is no paywall on any care action, and there never will be: nothing you have to buy to keep it happy. IT NOTICES WHEN YOU DON'T Leave it alone and it gets interesting. Leave it long enough and it goes out, and leaves a note. Come back and it comes back. Not one line of it blames you. THINGS THAT TURN UP ON THEIR OWN • A different shiny offer every day, drawn from a pool of thirty • A new quirk every seven days, eight of them in all • Odd little moments on days five, twelve and twenty one • Streak milestones at three, seven, fourteen and thirty days BOND LEVELS Everything you do together earns Bond XP, up to level twenty. Feeding, petting, dressing it, showing up for the first time each day. Bond never goes down, so a bad week costs you nothing you already earned. IT ONLY TALKS TO YOU IF YOU LET IT Notifications stay off until you tap "Let it text you?" That is the only time Cadge asks. When they are on, they are the pet's voice, not a marketing channel. No line blames you and no line asks you to pay. NO ACCOUNT, NOTHING TO SIGN UP FOR There is no login and no profile. Your pet lives on your device. If you turn notifications on, your phone registers with OneSignal, the service that sends them, and Cadge tells it your pet's bond level and strongest trait, whether you have Cadge+, and whether the phone is Android or iPhone. IT WORKS WITH NO SIGNAL The whole simulation is integer arithmetic with no clock reads and no network calls of its own, so it behaves correctly in airplane mode and catches up properly when you come back to it. WARDROBE Eight outfits at launch. Two of them are free for everyone. ITS OWN COLOUR, FREE Recolour the pet itself any time you like: free, always, no subscription needed. CADGE+ An optional subscription. It lets your pet wear every launch outfit in colours of your choice, and it doubles Bond XP. That is the entire list; care is not in it, and never will be. The yearly plan opens with a short free trial. Prices are shown in the app in your own currency. Terms of Use (EULA): https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/ WHO THIS IS FOR You miss the little egg pets and you do not want to carry a keychain. You want a pet on your home screen you can feed without opening an app. You want a virtual pet where keeping it alive and happy costs nothing. You want something small to check on each day that is not a social feed. You want a pet that turns out differently depending on how you actually treat it. You want it to keep working on a plane with no signal. WHAT PEOPLE USE IT FOR Feeding a pet from the home screen in the three seconds before the bus comes. Watching a creature change shape as it grows from a Blob to a Sprout to a Cadgling. A daily ritual with no account, no login and no profile. Dressing a pet up and recolouring it without paying for the colours. Coming back after a week away to something that noticed, and did not blame you.