in-house product
Cross Stitch Companion
A pattern viewer and progress tracker for cross stitch. Import a PDF chart, mark stitches as you go, and keep every project in one place — designed and built end-to-end by renenet.
Live on Google Play
Overview
Cross stitch still runs on paper: printed charts, a highlighter, and a pencil mark that tells you where you stopped. It works until the page gets lost, the marks get ambiguous, or the chart is forty pages long. Cross Stitch Companion moves that whole routine onto the phone — the chart you already own, opened, zoomable, and marked stitch by stitch.
You load your own PDF chart or pick one from the built-in library, zoom in far enough to read the symbols, and tap stitches as you finish them. Progress is saved with the project, so you can close the app mid-row and pick it up later. It works fully offline and needs no account — the files and the progress never leave the device. We built the app from the ground up: product design, development, and QA.
Features
PDF chart import
Open your own PDF charts of any size — the app reads the pages and turns them into a chart you can work on.
Stitch and progress tracking
Mark finished stitches with a tap and see how much of the project is done.
Smooth zoom and pan
Small symbols and dense grids stay readable at any zoom level, including on multi-page charts.
Built-in pattern library
A set of ready-made patterns shipped with the app. Watch a short video and the pattern is added to your working folder.
Works offline, no account
No sign-up, no sync, no server. Your charts and your progress stay on your device.
Distraction-free design
A clean interface built around one thing: the chart in front of you.
What was hard
Most of the engineering went into one thing: reading a PDF chart that was made for a printer, not for an app.
Every generator makes a different PDF
Charts exported from different pattern software use their own page layouts, overlaps, grid numbering, and legend formats. The importer has to make sense of all of them instead of assuming one shape.
Vector and raster in the same format
In some charts the symbols are real text and vector shapes; in others the whole page is a scanned image. Those need two different processing paths before they end up as the same thing on screen.
Finding the grid and the palette
Stitch marks are only useful if they land on the right cell, so the app has to recover the grid from the page and tie symbols to their thread colours.
Performance and memory
Large multi-page charts have to stay smooth while zooming and panning on mid-range phones, without loading the whole file into memory at once.
What's next
Two things are on the roadmap. First, filling out the built-in library — more patterns, better sorted, so the app is useful before you bring a chart of your own. Second, a subscription as an alternative to the current model, where patterns are unlocked by watching a short video.
Details
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