Intelligent software,
crafted for everyday life.
One person, a workshop in Sydney, and a rule about where the computing happens. Here is who we are and why we build the way we do.
Who we are
A very small workshop in Sydney.
We make software for people who would rather their tools did not talk about them behind their back.
The name
An owlery is where the owls are kept. This one keeps owl hours: the work happens at night, after the children are asleep. Not a brand story — the timetable.
The owl is the bird we have always used to mean knowing something and keeping a level head about it. That is the job we want the software to do: helping you think, not watching you do it.
Why on-device, specifically
Because it is the only promise that does not depend on us keeping it. A policy can be rewritten, a company sold, a server subpoenaed. A model running on your phone has none of those failure modes.
It costs us: on-device models are smaller, some features are simply not possible, and we never see a crash nobody told us about. We think it is the right trade, and would rather say so than pretend there is no trade.
One app does need a server of ours, because the data will not fit on a phone: Property Analyser looks an address up against every sale, school catchment and flood map in New South Wales. It keeps the rule as far as it can go. The server answers a search and keeps no record of it, the models still run on your phone, and what you save about a home never reaches us.
Getting hold of us
The support form is the only channel there is, and it works without an email address.