Changelog — Niek.li Chores

Version 7.2 version code 21 · 6 September 2026 Latest

Household sharing, for real this time.

New

Household sync. Sign in with Google, create a household, and invite people with a code. Chores, rooms, homes and completion history stay in step across devices.
Off by default. Sync does nothing until you switch it on and sign in. Leave it off and the app behaves exactly as before — everything stays on your device.
Invite codes that mean something. Codes are issued by the server, last a week, and can be replaced at any time, which revokes the old one. The previous code was generated on your phone and registered nowhere.
Syncs by itself. Changes travel on their own — shortly after you make them, when you open the app, and hourly in the background. There is a Sync now button, but you should never need it.
Works offline. Your device stays the source of truth. Edits made with no connection reconcile automatically once you are back on the network.
Built against Android 16 (API 36), which Google Play now requires.

Under the hood

Two people editing the same chore at the same moment now resolve to the same answer on both phones, instead of the row bouncing between them.
Completions merge as a set rather than overwriting: if you and a housemate each tick something off while offline, both are kept.
Deleting a chore, room or home records the deletion so it travels to other devices, rather than the row quietly reappearing on the next sync.
The privacy policy and store listing now describe exactly what does and does not leave the device in each state.

A smaller, more honest, more legible release.

Fixed

Chore titles, the cleanliness header, the completion percentage and several card backgrounds were being drawn fully transparent, leaving parts of the app invisible. The theme layer was discarding the colour palette it was handed; it now applies it.
The On-Time Rate on the Insights screen reported a fixed 92% for everyone. It is now measured from your actual completion intervals.
Screen titles no longer sit underneath the status bar clock, and the navigation labels are no longer covered by the system gesture handle.
Confirmation messages were never displayed — and because of that, the “Undo” offered after ticking a chore off could not be taken at all. Both work now.
The due-chore count on the Due tab was invisible.
The Insights screen credited every household member with 100% of the work.
The home-screen widget listed chores you had postponed as still due, and could sit up to half an hour behind the app. It now follows the same rules as the app and refreshes as soon as something changes.
The backup and restore buttons showed the word “Loading…” clipped inside a tiny box instead of a progress spinner.

Changed

Status colours now follow the Niek.li palette — a warm sage-to-terracotta ramp instead of the stock blue and red — and every step is checked for WCAG AA contrast in both light and dark themes.
Room colour swatches, the starter room set and the member avatar colours all retuned to match. Rooms you have already coloured keep their colour.
The privacy policy and store listing no longer describe a Firebase cloud sync and Google Sign-in that the app does not contain. The app does not request the internet permission and never has.
Household sharing has been withdrawn while it is built properly. Entering any six characters previously “joined” a household: it announced that cloud sync was active, invented two housemates with invented completion counts, and overwrote your own total with a made-up number. None of it was ever sent anywhere. The screen now keeps a local roster of who does what and says plainly that sharing is not available yet.

Under the hood

Download size cut by about 40% (APK 3.8 MB → 2.3 MB) by removing unused Firebase, Retrofit, Moshi, OkHttp and Material 3 dependencies.
Your data is no longer destroyed by a database upgrade: the schema is now exported and versioned, and future changes require a real migration.
Unit tests added for the urgency, statistics and milestone logic.
Groundwork for real household sharing: every chore, room and home now carries a globally unique id and change-tracking, so a future release can sync between devices without rows colliding. Nothing is transmitted — the app still has no internet permission.