Support

A real person reads every message. Binderpunk is made by one developer, so replies are honest rather than instant.

Before you email about a scan

The scanner is deliberately cautious. It would rather show you nothing than quietly add the wrong card to your collection, because a wrong entry is much harder to notice and undo than a card that simply did not lock on.

If a card is not being recognised, these are the usual causes, roughly in order:

• Light falling across the card. Overhead and side lighting are the most common culprits — a bright reflection across the artwork changes what the scanner sees. Tilt the card slightly, or move out from directly under the light.
• The card is at a steep angle. Roughly square-on to the camera works best. It does not need to be perfect.
• Sleeves and toploaders. Matte or heavily textured sleeves scatter enough detail to matter. A glossy sleeve is usually fine.
• Very new cards. If a card was revealed recently it may not be in the catalogue bundled with your version of the app yet.

If a card fails consistently in good light and square-on, that is worth reporting — it is a genuine gap rather than a technique problem, and knowing about it is how the catalogue improves.

Backing up your collection

Binderpunk stores everything on your device and has no cloud account, which means a backup is the only thing standing between you and a lost collection if your phone is lost, reset, or replaced.

Use the export option in Settings. It produces a single file containing your collection and your decks, and your device then asks where to put it — a cloud drive is the sensible choice. Restoring reads that file back on any device.

Worth doing after any significant scanning session.

Moving to a new phone

1. Export a backup on the old device and save it somewhere you can reach from the new one.
2. Install Binderpunk on the new device.
3. Choose restore in Settings and pick the file.

Because the data is local, a phone-to-phone transfer or an operating-system backup may carry the app data across on its own — but do not rely on that. The exported file is the one that definitely works.

Reporting a problem

The app has no crash reporting and sends us no diagnostics, which is good for your privacy and does mean we only learn about problems when someone tells us. What helps:

• What you were doing when it happened, in enough detail to try it ourselves.
• Your device and operating-system version.
• The app version, shown in Settings.
• For a scanning problem: which card, and a photo of it under the lighting where it failed. The photo is genuinely the most useful part.

Please do not send your backup file unless it is specifically asked for — it is your data, and it is rarely needed to diagnose anything.

Things Binderpunk deliberately does not do

• No accounts and no cloud sync. The trade is total privacy and full offline use, in exchange for you managing your own backups.
• No online card prices. Pricing needs a live connection and a data source with its own terms; the app stays offline instead.
• No loosened scanning to raise the hit rate. Covered above — a visible failure to lock on beats a silent wrong answer.