Welcome to CannaPal — your personal cultivation companion. CannaPal is built to handle the record-keeping side of growing so you can spend your time in the garden instead of in a spreadsheet. This guide gets you from a fresh install to tracking your first plant.
Installing CannaPal
CannaPal is available on Android through the Google Play Store. Once it’s installed, open it up — and that’s it. There’s no sign-up screen, no email to verify, and no password to remember.
Your data lives on your device
This is the most important thing to understand about CannaPal, and it’s a deliberate design choice: everything you log stays on your phone. Your plants, logs, photos, and notes are stored locally on your device, not on our servers. We can’t see your data, and the app works fully offline — in the tent, in the basement, anywhere, signal or not.
The trade-off worth knowing: because your data is on your device, it’s tied to that device. That’s exactly why CannaPal has a built-in backup system (covered in its own guide) so you can save your data and move it between devices whenever you like.
Adding your first plant
From the dashboard, tap to add a new plant. You’ll be asked for a few details — most are optional, so don’t feel like you need to fill in everything:
- Strain — the name of what you’re growing (the only field worth filling in right away).
- Breeder — who bred the seed. This matters more than you’d think: CannaPal uses the breeder to tell apart two different cuts of the same-named strain.
- Lineage / genetics / type — optional details for your records (indica/sativa/hybrid, parent strains, and so on).
- Stage — where the plant is in its life right now (Germinating, Seedling, Vegetative, Flowering, etc.).
- Location — which of your spaces it’s growing in, if you’ve set up locations.
- Photo — snap or attach a picture. CannaPal stores it locally with the plant.
Once you save, the plant appears on your dashboard, and you’re ready to start logging its progress.
The dashboard
The dashboard is home base. It shows your active plants at a glance, each with a quick progress line telling you where it is in its cycle (more on that in the tracking guide). Tap any plant to open it, view its history, and add new log entries.
A note on view modes
CannaPal has two view modes — Basic and Advanced — which you can switch in settings. Basic keeps the interface clean and hides the more technical fields (like pH, PPM/EC, and the canopy map) for growers who just want to track the essentials. Advanced surfaces everything. Start in whichever feels right; you can switch anytime, and it never changes or deletes your data — it only changes what’s shown.
Where to go next
Now that you’ve got a plant in CannaPal, the Daily Logging guide covers the core day-to-day rhythm of recording what you do to your plants.