About & contact

One person built this — Florin, the developer and operator of ThatPigeon — and these pages exist so you can check the work rather than take his word for it. One address reaches him: contact@thatpigeon.app. What to put in the message depends on what you want, and this page says which four things to write.

Why a loft manager

Pigeon racing has software, and most of it is unpleasant to use. The established tools are Windows desktop programs; with some of the cloud ones, the day you stop paying is the day you can no longer reach what you wrote. A fancier's loft book is twenty years of breeding decisions, and the software holding it treats that as leverage rather than as a responsibility.

Here, the day you stop paying is the day the account goes read-only and the export still works. Writing stops, reading does not.

None of that is a technology problem. It is a care problem, and care is the one thing a single developer can actually compete on. That is the whole thesis, and the rest of these pages are the evidence for whether it is being delivered.

The commercial arrangements — who owns your data, what will and will not ever be sold, and why this is not open source — are on Principles.

How to reach us

One address, contact@thatpigeon.app. There is no ticketing system and no support queue; there is one person reading, so a clear message gets a faster answer than a formal one.

Reporting a bug. What you did, what happened, and what you expected instead. If you can, add your phone model, your Android version and the screen you were on. A screenshot is worth more than a description of a screenshot.

Asking for a feature. Tell us the problem before the solution — what you are trying to do in your loft, and what you do today instead. Features that came from a sentence like that have been better than features that came from a specification.

Sending a federation or clock export. The file exactly as the program produced it, unmodified, plus one line saying what produced it. What happens to it, and what we do about files that name other fanciers, is on Import and export formats.

Reporting a security issue. Same address. Say what you found and how to reproduce it; you will get a human reply. If it is sensitive, say so in the first line and we will agree a channel before you send details. There is no bug-bounty programme and no formal disclosure timetable — pretending otherwise would be the kind of claim Security exists to avoid.

The testing programme

The app is in closed testing. Intră în testare has the enrolment form; it is in Romanian, because the testers are.

These pages are drafts. Every one of them carries a draft status until it has had a line-by-line review, and the banner on each page says so. The facts in them are checked against the code — every repository path they cite must exist or the build fails — but the wording has not had its final read, and a page may change before it settles.

What to read first

• If you want to know why this exists at all — Why. One page, first person, on the reason rather than the product.
• If you want to know what happens to your data — Your data. It carries a five-minute walkthrough for checking the important claims yourself, on your own phone.
• If you want to check our numbers against your federation's — How we calculate. Every formula, with the function from the code beside it.
• If you are assessing how this is built — Architecture, then Quality. The first has the decisions and the trade-offs, including three that went badly; the second has how the rules are enforced, with a real retrospective and a real device checklist published beside it.