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Looking for simple, no-frills loyalty/reward card app

L

larrycl

Member
I'm looking for an app that will store the barcodes & numbers for my various loyalty/reward cards. While there seem to be a bunch of apps that do this, they all are too "heavy"; they seem to require accounts, they integrate with advertising & location-based-services, etc. I don't want any of that. I really only want something as no-frills as my contacts app.

Any suggestions?
 
Did you find anything? I un-installed several (Keyring, Cardstor) as they tie into stores and bring advertising. Also I don't want the possibility of my info such as my airline loyalty card with thousands of miles on it uploaded anywhere. I just want to keep it local on my phone.

Cardstor was close in that it scanned your barcode and used the deciphered numbers to generate a clean version of the barcode on your screen, in other words it scanned, decoded the numbers then recoded the numbers into a barcode again.

But I guess without the link to the merchants, there is no revenue for these card scanning apps. I'd be happy to pay for the app if there was no link to merchants.

PS. I'll pursue barcode apps that scan, decode, and recode to a clean barcode and stores the image. That would suffice.
 
you know that WOULD be a cool app. I guess an easy (relatively speaking) temp solution is to simply MAKE your own barcodes the right size for your screen (there must be a program to do this??) and then have a folder of IMAGES literally a jpg for each one. pick the one you want to load let them scan it.

thats a GREAT idea I am going to have to try it.
 
Hi Nerys,
That's a great idea (make an app, if that's what you meant). Also when I set up the loyalty card programs I tried, I skipped setting up an account and hopefully my card info wasn't uploaded.

I don't really care about the grocery store and department store cards. The main benefit is the immediate discount when shopping. I found that at the rate I accumulate points, it is so pitifully slow that the tiny amount of accumulated rewards are worthless to me. After shopping at our main source of household goods for the past 15 years, we don't even have enough points for a $10 gift card. Sad.

However, in comparison, my airline travel card has thousands and thousands of points that are worth hundreds of real dollars if someone were to get hold of those points somehow. I initially added that card to my card app but have since deleted it as I had no idea where the information was going.

I would pay $2 for an app that had the ability to:
- scan a loyalty card, decipher the number and generate a clean version of the barcode for scanning.
- could enter numbers manually and the app would generate the corresponding barcode
- was not supported by advertising
- had no links to coupons pushed to the device
- had password protection to access info in the app
- as a last resort, would store a picture of the barcode (my library card barcode won't resolve in any of the loyalty card apps, so I would just carry a good picture of the card.
- not require an account or any other connection between the app and the software company.

The revenue stream for the app developer would be the payment, not the payments from the merchants who are looking to connect with more customers. The revenue for Cardstore, Fidme, Keyring etc. is from the participating merchants. The risk isn't with the app companies, it's if their data gets compromised.

I would forgo a free app to preserve my privacy and risk of my hard earned travel (or any) points from being fraudulently taken.

thanks,
-Tony
 
agreed :-) so is there a PC app that will make a "scannable" barcode from these cards and saved it as a specified dimension jpg ?
 
I was thinking of doing it entirely on the android phone and not using a PC. I see elsewhere references to android screen capture apps. So my work flow would be:

- use of the available apps (e.g., Fidme) to scan, decipher, and regenerate the barcode
- do screen capture and save the image
- rename the image file to the store name
- store the images in a folder for barcodes
- delete newly created barcode from the Fidme/Cardstore/Keyring app

that would be it, no fancy catalogue system, I'd pull up the image and get it scanned at the store.

I notice in my picture gallery what appear to be clean barcodes, I don't know which of the 4 apps I tried generated them. Those would be fine too for scanning at the store. When I get a moment, I'll look more closely.

[update] Yes, the barcodes in the picture gallery are clean versions and the tagline at the bottom of each one is www.Tech-IT.com I need to figure out which loyalty card app created the barcodes. One thing that Fidme does, and I'm not sure the others do, is when the barcode images rotated to landscape, it gets locked into landscape so as it is waived in front of the bar code reader, the image does not flip back and forth between landscape and portrait. When viewing the image in the picture gallery, the barcode does flip back and forth depending on the orientation of the phone. Also there appears to be two versions of each barcode, one landscape and one portrait.

[update] The clean barcodes are in the HandyCard folder so HandyCard must generate and store the new barcodes as stand alone jpegs. These jpegs are what get displayed when you scan your barcode at the store.
 
sure but you can't do that so as a temporary solution do it on the PC while waiting for a droid app :-)

Ohhh a screen cap is a good idea too !! would be assured the right size. I would still edit on the PC so I could rename and add the logo of whatever card it was so I could ID them more easily.
 
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