Velodok

A digital ID for your bicycles.

Velodok is an unofficial replacement for a cancelled government app that was meant to help you register your bike and prove ownership in case of theft. It keeps the full record of every bike you own - frame number, photos, receipts, components - on your phone, so that when you need it, you have it. No account, no cloud, no waiting for a public service that never shipped.

What it is

Velodok is a bike registry that lives on your phone. You add each bike once, in a five-step form, and it stores the things a police report or an insurance claim will actually ask for:

• Identity - name, type, brand, model, year, size, colour, and the two numbers that matter: the frame number and the police registration number.
• Purchase - date, price, currency, dealer, insured value, weight.
• Components - a per-part list covering 19 component types, from frame and fork down to handlebar tape and bottom bracket, each with its own brand, model, price, weight and purchase date.
• Photos and documents - an overview shot, detail photos, a dedicated frame-number photo, and the purchase receipt. Taken with the camera or picked from the gallery, viewable full-screen.
• Notes - anything that doesn’t fit a field.

It’s German-language, Material Design, and works with the phone in flight mode. There is no sign-up step, because there is nothing to sign up to.

Why it exists

Bike theft is a paperwork problem as much as a crime problem. The police want a frame number. The insurer wants a receipt and proof the bike was yours. Almost nobody has either to hand, because that information lives on a sticker in a drawer, in an email from three years ago, and in a photo you didn’t take.

A government app was supposed to solve exactly this - a national bike registry you could point at after a theft. It was cancelled. The need didn’t go away with it.

Velodok is the version that exists:

• Prepared, not reactive. The five minutes you spend adding a bike happen while you still own it. That’s the whole point.
• Yours, on your device. Everything is in a local SQLite database and the phone’s own filesystem. No account, no server, nothing to leak, nothing to shut down. A registry that can be cancelled a second time isn’t much of a registry.
• Detailed enough to be evidence. A frame number and a photo of it. A receipt. A component list that distinguishes your bike from every other black gravel bike on the rack.

Core features

Vision

The local app is the product, and it stays usable without an account forever. But a registry you can only read on the phone in your pocket has an obvious limit - it’s the one device a thief might also have taken. The direction:

• Optional accounts and cloud sync. Opt-in, never required. Bikes and media sync so a lost or stolen phone doesn’t take the evidence with it.
• Read-only share links with a QR code. A single link you can hand to the police or an insurer - printable, no app needed on their end - with a configurable expiry.
• PDF export for insurance paperwork, generated from the record you already have.
• French and Italian alongside German, to actually cover the countries this is aimed at.

Beyond that, Velodok stays deliberately narrow. It’s a digital ID - it proves the bike is yours. Service history and maintenance tracking are a different job, which is what Velobase is for.

Technical details

Stack

Engineering decisions

• No network layer, on purpose. There is no API client, no auth code and no sync engine in the app - not stubbed, not disabled, absent. Everything reads and writes local SQLite. That’s what makes “works offline” a property of the architecture rather than a feature that can regress.
• The schema dropped its sync bookkeeping. An earlier design carried local_id / server_id / is_dirty / is_deleted on every table for a sync layer that hadn’t been built. The shipped schema uses a plain UUID primary key instead. Carrying the cost of a distributed-systems design for a single-device app is a tax with no payer; it can be reintroduced alongside the sync layer that justifies it.
• Media is filesystem, never blob. The database stores a local_path per image; the bytes live in the app’s own directory via expo-file-system. The SQLite file stays small enough to stay fast, and photos are handed straight to expo-image without a round trip through the DB.
• Deletion is enforced by the database. PRAGMA foreign_keys = ON at connection time, with onDelete: "cascade" from bikes to both components and media. Removing a bike can’t leave orphaned rows behind, regardless of what the calling code forgets.
• WAL from the start. PRAGMA journal_mode = WAL - the reads (list screen, detail screen) and the writes (form submit, photo capture) stop blocking each other, which is what keeps navigation snappy while a photo is being saved.
• Three variants, three bundle IDs. net.ntrapp.velodok, .dev and .test, each with its own name and accent colour. Development, preview and production builds coexist on one phone, so testing a release candidate doesn’t mean uninstalling the copy holding your actual bikes.
• A stepper instead of a wall of inputs. Sixteen fields, a component list and a photo picker in one scroll is an abandoned form. Splitting it into five labelled steps with a progress bar means every screen has an obvious end.
• Releases are fully automated. Conventional commits drive release-please, which opens the release PR and tags the version; publishing the release triggers a local EAS production build in CI that attaches the signed APK. The app version is read from package.json, so the binary can’t disagree with the tag.

Get & use Velodok

Install (Android APK)

Velodok is not on the Play Store, so you install the APK directly:

1. Download the latest build: Velodok.apk.
2. Allow installs from your browser or file manager (Settings → Apps → Special access → Install unknown apps).
3. Open the APK to install. Android will warn you the app isn’t verified - that’s expected for a sideloaded build.

First run

1. Tap Velo hinzufügen on the empty home screen.
2. Work through the five steps. The two fields worth not skipping are the frame number and a photo of the frame number - they’re what a police report is built on.
3. Add the purchase receipt under Fotos while you can still find it.

Build from source

Velodok is a managed Expo app targeting Android. It depends on native modules (SQLite, MMKV, Reanimated), so run it as a development build rather than in Expo Go.

git clone https://github.com/elRatto21/Velodok
cd Velodok
pnpm install

# Start the dev-client bundler
pnpm dev

Schema changes go through Drizzle:

pnpm generate   # drizzle-kit generate

Uses pnpm for all package management.

Velodok - your bike, on the record.