I built an app that helps you get 5 friends out to vote against fascist parties. And it’s entirely offline.

Friends Against Fascists got a new lick of paint and is **available on the Play Store. Now with more crow**.

Why a crow? Crows are clever, devoted, loyal, cute, but if you mess with them or those they care about, they will come together as a formidable group and they won’t let you forget it.

“Well, if I can’t vote in this election, maybe I’ll write an app to help others like me get their eligible friends to vote instead. If everybody who couldn’t vote was able to convince 5 people who could to vote for democratic parties, that’d have an impact, right?”

This was (roughly) a conversation I had with a friend on one of my morning walks in Berlin’s Tempelhofer Feld. It was February 2025, and Germany’s far-right AfD party was on course to achieve its best result yet in the upcoming Bundestag election. I was on garden leave before starting a new job, and I had some time.

So I got to writing this app and quicky released something “that worked” just before the election. 100 people downloaded it. At least one got in touch and said they got their five out — so I felt that I’d at least done something.

It’s easy to be cynical about tech solving things, especially in 2026, but something I built in the past actually had a huge impact — one that I never expected. It made me realise just how much the right tool can bring a lot of people together to have an impact and I still truly believe that if tech has the power to do so much damage, it must have the same potential to do good.

But it wasn’t pretty…

I’m not a designer, as much as I am trying to be better at it. Back then I had one imperative: for the app to work.

I spent the last six months or so revamping it, adding the option for multiple elections, and got an actual real designer (not me) to design a cool crow mascot. Lots of people have helped test it and have given lots of awesome feedback — I’m so very grateful to them for that.

I don’t want your data. I don’t want you to even think I want your data.

Making this app offline-only wasn’t just a choice, it’s a promise. By not requesting the Internet permission in the Android app manifest file, the app is incapable of taking data off your device. Everything is stored locally.

This of course carries a downside — it means if you uninstall the app, you lose that data (although an on-device-only backup is on my list of plans). The disadvantage to full data sovereignty is inconvenience.

It also means for me that I will never see detailed metrics as to how many people used the app or how many people you got out to vote. I’ll be able to see how many people downloaded it, and that’s about it. That’s the only figure I’ll be able to boast about.

But it means you can be confident that this app is not about anything other than helping you to get people out to vote for democratic parties.

Elections aren’t won on popularity, but on turnout.

There is a fairly well known truth in politics. You could be the most popular person in the world, but that doesn’t mean your adoring fans will turn up to the polling station. You’d be surprised how many people forget, or get the date wrong, or simply get home after a dreadful day at work and decide they just want to chill instead. You’d also be surprised at how much of an impact someone coming to their door has in reminding/nudging them.

That’s why canvassers knock your door from morning to night on election day — not because they like to piss you off, but because it works.

If it’s your friend reminding you, well, you’d be even more likely to do it.

Change rarely happens because of one person. It happens when enough people show up.

The world is a scary place right now, and you’re probably seeing some worrying trends from people and places you never expected. And it’s hardly surprising — open up Facebook and have a scroll. It’s not the photo-reel of uni nights out that it used to be, but deep amounts of angry disinformation placed into your feed precisely because it has been optimised to make you angry.

Well, your close ones are seeing that too. Doomscrolling through all sorts of fascist nonsense disguised as news, reinforcing fear of the other.

The best antidote to all this nonsense is when someone they trust and love debunks it. It’ll require a hell of a lot of patience — an amount even I’m willing to admit I often don’t have. But we are so far down this awful rabbit hole right now that it’s hard to imagine ever coming out of it.

So, I wrote this app to try to help you do that. One election. Just find five friends and make sure they vote. If even just one of you use it to do that, then great, I’m happy. That’s five more people that might not have voted otherwise. But my hope is that it’ll help far more of you, especially those who don’t necessarily think of yourself as activists but who are worried about where we are heading.

If you turn the tide against fascism, it’ll be because you all showed up. I hope this app helps you even just a little bit to get there.

*Friends Against Fascists on the Google Play Store*