Pockling: a virtual pet app for iPhone that can never die

Pockling is a free virtual pet app for iPhone and iPad, and its pet can never die or run away. You pick an egg, tap it until it cracks, name what hatches and look after it on your phone’s real clock. Its five needs fall while you’re away, but time alone can’t take any of them below 14 out of 100, and when you come back it’s just very glad to see you.

We made Pockling at 9io. It has been on the App Store as Pockling: Cute Virtual Pet since 5 November 2026, with version 1.1 since 6 November, and it has no ads, in-app purchases or accounts. To try it first, the same game plays free in your browser at bitfold.9io.ai/pockling, with no sign-up.

This post covers hatching, care, talk-back, bedtime, growing up, time away and berries, with numbers from the game’s own source, and ends with a daily checklist.

Hatching: pick an egg, tap six times, give it a name

The first time you open Pockling, six patterned eggs wobble on the screen as if something inside is moving. They hold the six kinds, Kitling, Bunling, Puppling, Cubling, Foxling and Drakling, and tapping one shows which is inside. You choose the kind. The coat is a surprise, picked at random from that kind’s four.

Tap the egg six times. The cracks spread, the game says “Something moved!” after two taps and “Almost there!” after four, and on the sixth the shell bursts. A sleepy baby blinks, looks around and hops up to say hello. Then the game asks for a name of up to 12 characters, offers four suggestions and picks one for you if you leave the box empty. You start with 30 berries, and the first tips tell you to stroke it and boop its nose.

Stroking, boops, tickles and cuddles

Most of Pockling is touch. Stroke it and it purrs, and in the app you feel the purr as a steady vibration under your finger. Love rises with how far your finger travels, and a long stroke turns its eyes into hearts.

Tap its nose for a boop. Tap its tummy and it giggles, and five quick taps make it roll over laughing. Press and hold for half a second for a cuddle, which zooms in and adds 1.6 love for every 0.34 seconds you hold on. Put a finger on it and drag outwards, and it stretches. Pull far enough and it comes off the floor, so you can carry it and let go, and it lands with one big, soft bounce.

When it’s joyful, with no need under 30 and an average of 78 or more, it sometimes presses its nose to the screen and fogs up the glass. After a long cuddle it may lick the glass instead.

Food, baths, walkies and three games

Feed opens a tray of 12 foods. Drag one to its mouth, or tap it to toss it over. Four are free and always in the bowl, and eight cost 2 to 12 berries. Each kind has a favourite food, greeted with a happy double hop and extra love, and one it can’t stand. That one gets a nibble, a face and a spit, costs nothing, and from then on it turns away when you bring it near. At 97 on the tummy ring it’s full.

A bath goes soap, shower, towel. Soap it into a ball of bubbles, rinse them off, then rub it dry while it purrs, and it shakes, poofs up and gets a rainbow behind the tub. The rubber duck squeaks when you tap it. A finished bath sets clean to 100.

For walkies, hold your finger ahead of it and it trots after your finger on a lead through the park, and every berry it passes over is yours. It sniffs flowers, chases butterflies you tap, splashes through mud and now and then meets a Pockling of another kind. After dark on your clock there are fireflies. Longer walks give more fun and love, up to 150 m, and mud takes 28 off clean against 6 for a clean walk.

In Hide and Seek its tail pokes out for the first two rounds, and it giggles every few seconds, or straight away after your second wrong guess. Each finished game adds 22 fun and 4 love, uses 9 energy and 5 tummy, and pays berries for the score, up to 40 a game.

Talk-back: it says what you say, squeakily

Tap the microphone button, allow the microphone the first time, and say something. Your Pockling listens, then says it back in a squeaky little voice, its mouth moving with the sound. In the browser version a take ends after 0.65 seconds of quiet or 7 seconds of talking, and plays back at 1.5 times the speed, which is what raises the pitch. In the app, the native layer records and pitches up your voice and sends its loudness back so the lips can follow.

Each reply counts as a caring act. Nothing you say leaves your device. The sound is held in memory only until it has been played back, and nothing is saved.

The real clock, bedtime and growing up

Pockling keeps your phone’s local time. The sky in its window turns from night to day between 5am and 8.30am and back to night soon after 8pm, with the sun up from 6am to 7.30pm and stars and fairy lights after dark. The room darkens more than your Pockling does, because, as a comment in the code puts it, “it should always be easy to love”.

Energy falls 5 points an hour while it’s awake, so a rested Pockling is yawning for bed about 14 hours later. Tap Sleep and it hops into bed, the room dims and a star projector turns on the walls. It won’t go at 97 energy or more. Asleep, its energy climbs 24 points an hour and the other needs fall more slowly. It gets up by itself once its energy is full, which takes under four hours even from 14, or when you tap Wake up.

It grows from Baby to Kid after 2 days of care and to Grown after 7. A day of care is a calendar day, by your phone’s clock, with at least one caring act. These count.

• Feeding it something it eats. The food it spits out doesn’t count.
• Finishing a bath, a walk or a mini-game.
• Putting it to bed.
• A talk-back reply.
• Cuddling, each time taps, strokes and holds add up to 10 love. That’s about nine taps, or a cuddle of two to three seconds.

Only the first caring act of a day counts towards growing up, so a long session doesn’t speed it up and the days needn’t be in a row. Cared for daily, a Pockling hatched on a Monday is a Kid on Tuesday and Grown on Sunday. As it grows it gets bigger and its voice drops, from 1.3 times its grown-up pitch as a baby to 1.14 times as a kid.

Five needs, and what happens while you’re away

Five rings along the top show its needs out of 100. Under 30 a ring turns red and throbs, the button for the lowest need wiggles, and now and then a thought bubble shows what it’s after. There’s no button for love. You stroke it.

The needs move with real time even while the app is closed. When you come back, the game works out how long you were gone, and time can take a need down to 14 and no further. The code calls this the floor, and a comment says it’s there “so coming back never feels like a punishment”. Leave it for a few days and you’ll find it at 14 across the board, asking for food first, and no worse however long you stayed away. Games and walks can still take a need below 14, because the floor only applies to time passing. Unless it’s asleep, it greets you with hops and hearts when you open the game or come back to it after 20 minutes.

These numbers are constants in the game’s state.js and catalog.js as served on 6 November 2026, and the hours are worked out from them. They describe the rules. We haven’t measured how people play.

Why this virtual pet app can never die

Pockling is a virtual pet that doesn’t die, and its App Store listing puts that under the heading Kind by design, along with no ads, no in-app purchases, no accounts and no timers that nag you. A comment at the top of the game’s rules says “A Pockling never dies and never leaves: at worst it’s a little sad and very pleased to see you.” Five rules keep that promise.

• Nothing in the save means dead or gone. The pet is a handful of numbers from 0 to 100, and the worst they can mean is that it wants something. The only way to lose it in the game is Start over in Settings, which asks you to confirm first.
• Time away stops at 14, however long you’re gone.
• Missing a day costs only the streak. The stamp book starts it again at one, noting that your pet “will never hold it against you”, and days of care never go down.
• Nothing nags. In the game it asks with a thought bubble and a wiggling button. Outside it, nothing reaches you unless you turn on the app’s daily reminder, which starts off.
• Berries come only from playing. There’s nothing to buy with real money, and the food it hates doesn’t cost you berries.

Berries, the stamp book, outfits and rooms

Berries are the game’s only money. The first time you open Pockling on a calendar day, it stamps a sticker in your stamp book and pays 10 berries plus 2 for each day of your streak, counting up to 10 days. That’s 12 on a first day and 30 from the tenth day in a row. The sticker is one of 28 and depends only on the date, so everyone who visits on the same date gets the same one.

Walks pay a berry for each one picked up, and games up to 40 each. Caring also earns love points, from up to 10 for a long walk down to 1 for a talk-back reply. Level 2 takes 30 points, level 3 takes 90 and level 4 180, and each new level pays 15 berries plus 5 per level, so 25 at level 2.

Your Pockling can wear one thing each on its head, face and neck. All 15 outfits cost 850 berries together and the five rooms 560, so owning everything takes 1,410.

What the iPhone app adds to the browser version

Pockling is a cute virtual pet app for iPhone and iPad, and the App Store app is the browser game inside a small native layer. The game’s platform.js lists what that layer handles.

• The purr you feel. Stroking, cuddling and towelling it switch on a continuous purr in the app’s haptics. In a browser the game can only ask for short vibrations, where the browser supports them.
• Talk-back recording. The app records and pitches up your voice. In a browser the game does it with the Web Audio API.
• A daily reminder. Only the app shows the Daily reminder setting, “A little nudge in the evening”, and it’s off until you turn it on. The game hands the switch and your pet’s name to the app, which takes it from there.
• Tilt. The app reports the phone’s tilt so the room shifts gently as you move it. Safari on iPhone asks permission for motion, and the game doesn’t ask for so small an effect.
• Saving and sharing. The app keeps its own copy of your save and shares your photo cards. A browser keeps your pet in that browser on that device, and clearing its data starts a new egg.

What 1.1 added

Version 1.1 reached the App Store on 6 November 2026 and gives your Pockling more to say. Its What’s New says it coos while you stroke it, hearts chime as they pop up, and it hums, sings and pitter-patters about as it plays. Swing it around for a “wheee!”, and the purr comes through phone speakers much more clearly.

A daily care checklist

• Open it once a day for the stamp and 12 to 30 berries.
• Do one caring thing. That’s a day of care, and it takes 7 to grow up.
• Check the rings. Red and throbbing means under 30, and the wiggling button is for the lowest need.
• Feed it first when you’re short of time. Tummy falls fastest, at 6 points an hour.
• Give it its favourite food, and leave out the one it spat out.
• Walk it 150 m or more, steer it over the berries, and bath it after any mud.
• Put it to bed when it yawns.
• After time away there’s nothing to fix. Feed it, then give it a cuddle.

For each kind’s coats and the food it loves, see the guide to every Pockling. For how the game paints all of this in code, see our engineering post.

Frequently asked questions