At first Howlr was mostly a dating and hook-up app but a lot of users use it now to find local friend, to introduce themselves to their local community or just to talk with friendly strangers in different countries. It's really up to you!

No. Never. That is something we promised. We hate ads on apps and we hate premium stuff.

We will only work through Patreon and donations. This way, the ones who want to support us can do it, and we don't have to force ads on everyone!

No, Howlr is a non-profit organisation under the French law of 1901, our registration number is W751245279 in the Répertoire National des Associations.

It's a voluntary and benevolent effort throughout the years from a handful of furry and furry-friendly developers in Europe. At a given time one developer will usually handle the application and another one the backend part (though several-months hiatuses frequently happen). We also have an anonymity rule in place for our own peace of mind.

We felt that this kind of service were missing in the Furry community and we were all also eager to get our hands in mobile development.

Strictly speaking: no. Howlr is a non-profit organisation and all our funds are used for the app. However the time we spent building it and learning new things out of it made us better and more skilled developers, which is something that proves to be way more valuable in our day-to-day jobs (in terms of responsabilities and money earned) and in our portfolio than trying to sell an app to our community.

If you're a Furry developer — with a big idea for a new service for our community — you don't have to wait for a way to monetize it if you're not an entrepreneur at heart. Building something that is useful, technically challenging and (hopefully) successful to put in your portfolio can help you find your dream job.

No, we lost the password years ago and we don't plan to get the account back or make a new one. We are all fine with mouth to ear!

Sushi, like all of us, can sometimes go through difficult times when he needs to step down and focus on other things. He still remembers fondly about some interactions he had with you and about the kind words you said.

For now only the application code is available, but the backend code should be released pretty soon! We have to work on making the TOS, Privacy policy and this very FAQ easily editable, add more automatic tests on particular edge-cases, work on the admin tools and write a full documentation on how to install it.

We would really like seeing other communities, or other parts of the Furry community that aren't happy with Howlr, spinning their own servers and use the service as it suits them.

No. Not for now at least. Using Telegram is pretty handy for us and for most users in the Furry community.

Yes absolutely, but you will need to set your location manually.

The communication with our server is encrypted and the content of the message is also encrypted before it gets saved to our database, however it is not end-to-end encryption.

No, and there's no reason for us to do that.

That's because you don't use the same Telegram account as the one that was used to make your previous Howlr account. There is currently no solution for this problem, sadly.

No. Your gallery and your avatar are in public space. Everything must stay clean. You can still send NSFW pictures within the chats thought.

You can go on their profile, and report them through the top right button.

We will review the case and delete the picture and/or ban the user if necessary.

Howlr is build on the open-source Expo framework, it is an awesome tool to build complex apps and to deploy them easily. Expo comes with a very wide range of functionnaly, some of them include ad-related things, reporting tools, etc. You can see an exhaustive list of them in the Expo documentation.

We don't use any of those ad-trackers, though they are still packed within the app. The people at Expo are working on making it possible to remove them entirely (see this thread) but in the meantime it's just dead code within Howlr that is never executed.