Straight answers, in the order people actually ask them.
Still Around is a free desktop pet app for macOS and Windows. You give it a few photographs of your own cat or dog, it draws a small animated version of them, and they live on your desktop — wandering about, sitting, washing and napping while you work.
Yes, completely. There is no paid tier, no trial, no subscription and no advertising. The source is public under the MIT licence.
Both. The Mac build is a universal app for Apple silicon and Intel and lives in the menu bar; the Windows build runs on Windows 10 and 11 and lives in the system tray. There is also a browser version, right here on this site, that makes the pet without installing anything.
No. There is no server anywhere in this product, so there is nowhere for a photograph to be uploaded to. The vision models run inside your own browser tab or your own machine, and the pictures are gone the moment you close it. Nothing is stored, and nothing is used for training.
This is worth being precise about, because plenty of apps in this shape do the opposite. You can check it: open your browser's network tab while you build a pet, or read the source.
Cats and dogs both. Dogs are drawn by their own rig rather than a stretched cat, which is why they took longer to arrive and why they actually look like dogs.
There is nothing to sign up for. No email address, no password, no account of any kind — there is no server to hold one.
A pet file is your pet written down as about thirty numbers — their colours, their markings, their shape. It holds no photographs. It is what the website hands to the desktop app, it is small enough to email to someone, and it is yours on your own disk. If you make your pet inside the app, there is no file to handle at all.
Only to download the app, and once in the browser: the first pet you build fetches about 20 MB of vision models from a public CDN, which are then cached. After that your pet runs on your desktop with no network at all.
Because the installers are not yet code-signed — a certificate costs money this project does not take in, and signing is on the list. On a Mac, right-click the app and choose Open, then Open again in the dialog. On Windows, click More info and then Run anyway.
If you would rather not take that on trust, the whole source is public and you can build it yourself.
Then you fix it, and that is by design. After it draws your pet you get an editor with their colours, coat pattern, ears and tail, and you nudge whatever came out wrong. You click one of their eyes in the photo to set the eye colour, because no measurement is as reliable as you are.
Software cannot know what your pet looked like. You do.
Not today. Still Around is a desktop app for macOS and Windows, and the pet maker runs in any modern browser including a phone's. A pet that floats over other apps is something the desktop allows and a phone largely does not.
Yes, under the MIT licence, at github.com/ankuranwekar-dev/still-around. The drawing engine, the photo analyser and this website are all in that repository.
It is a small drawing on a canvas, and it deliberately idles: full frame rate while your pet is walking or talking, a trickle once they have settled. Building the pet is the expensive part, and that happens once. You can also set the frame rates yourself in Settings.
Yes. Click the paw in the menu bar or system tray and add another, as many times as you like. They share the desktop.