Fal: Coffee Cup Reading

Arcadia

Contains adsIn-app purchases

About this app

Fal is coffee cup reading the old way: you look into your own cup and say what you see. The app holds the book, the zones of the cup and your history of cups.

Drink your Turkish, Greek or Bosnian coffee, turn the cup over on its saucer and let the grounds settle. Photograph it from straight above with the handle in view, or pick a photo from your gallery. Fit a circle to the rim, tap where the handle is, and then tap every shape you can make out: an anchor, a bird, a ring, a crescent moon. Each mark takes its meaning from the dictionary and its place from the cup.

YOU SEE THE SHAPES
The app does not look at your photo for you. There is no image recognition, no "AI reading", no server. In the tradition the reader sees the shapes, and here the reader is you. The photo never leaves your phone unless you share it.

THE BOOK
• 170 symbols from Tea-Cup Reading and the Art of Fortune-Telling by Tea Leaves, by "A Highland Seer", 1920
• Every entry quoted as printed, from Abbey to Zebra, with nothing added and nothing softened
• Searchable, with cross-references the book itself gives

THE ZONES OF THE CUP
• Near the rim: what may be expected to happen quickly
• On the side: what is not so far off
• At the bottom: the remoter future
• The handle stands for the one whose cup it is; the nearer a shape lies to it, the nearer it is to fulfilment
• The book's own sentences are shown beside each zone; the lines the app draws between them are marked as the app's own

THE READING
• Your marks listed band by band, from the rim to the bottom, each with the book's words and where it lies in the cup
• No score, no verdict, no "lucky cup": a list, as the book lays it out
• Save the cup with its photo and its marks, and come back to it later
• Share a card of your cup and its symbols as an image

LORE
How the cup is made in Turkey and Greece, where the word fal comes from, the zones of the cup, the 1920 book itself, and why the app leaves the seeing to you. Each custom is given with its source.

PRIVATE BY DESIGN
• No camera permission: photos come through your phone's own camera app or the photo picker
• Every photo is shrunk and saved without its location data
• Your cups are not backed up to the cloud; delete one and its photo goes with it

A symbol of the day from the book sits on your home screen as a widget.

Free to install, with ads. A single one-time purchase removes them. Everything else is free either way, and there is no limit on saved cups.