The year 2025 has become a landmark for the ARK Builders team as we have made a leap in all aspects of open-source application development.

First, we expanded our team to work on both mobile apps and native apps for desktop and laptop devices running macOS, Linux, and Windows.

Second, we have thoroughly focused on the design of our applications to deliver a smooth user experience, in addition to the core security and privacy principles we’ve focused on since the very beginning.

As a result, we have completely redesigned the Rate app — a currency exchange calculator and private portfolio manager that works everywhere, anywhere, online and offline.

Rate 2.0

The Rate app lets you privately track assets and calculate exchanges with offline support.

You can download Rate from the Play Store. Currently, only the Android version is available, but we aim to release the iOS version very soon.

What is the ARK Rate App?

ARK Rate is a powerful and user-friendly currency converter allowing you to quickly and accurately convert any currency to another.

Its private portfolio manager gives you the ability to track and manage multiple types of assets, from traditional currencies to cryptocurrencies, all while maintaining complete control over your financial data.

With our app, calculate fair exchange instantly, even after landing in a new country.

Technical Architecture: How Rate 2.0 Keeps Your Data Private and Available Offline

While Rate 2.0’s sleek new interface catches the eye, its underlying architecture represents an equally significant advancement. We’ve built Rate 2.0 with a local-first approach, ensuring your financial data remains truly yours while providing the convenience you’d expect from modern apps.

Most currency converter apps rely heavily on constant internet connectivity, keeping your data on company servers and requiring network requests for every conversion. Rate 2.0 takes a different path. By keeping your data on your device:

• You can convert currencies anywhere, even offline
• Your portfolio data stays exclusively on your device
• Calculations happen instantly
• You maintain control of your financial privacy

Practical Example

ARK Rate 2.0 can be helpful even in rural areas or exotic locations: what if you need to pay a taxi driver but you don’t have local currency or an Internet connection?

With Rate you can easily convert any amount to local currency on the spot, compare it across multiple currencies, and make quick decisions about fair prices, all without needing to search for WiFi or use expensive mobile data.

Additional features are also very convenient, such as seeing the same value in multiple target currencies. And there’s no need to register an account, login, subscribe or see annoying ads!

Convenient Home Screen Widget

If you prefer to stay up-to-date to current exchange rates, be it conventional currencies or crypto, you can also set up our widget to your home screen that will update automatically in the background. This way you won’t miss the surge in price of assets you hold.

Privately Manage Your Portfolio

Our New Approach

Now, for every application we develop, we start with the design process: considering features and user scenarios before planning the layout of control elements and the application’s appearance. This takes more time, but the user experience is now beyond superior.

Pin the widget to your home screen to keep an eye on important exchange rates.

Our Full Open-Source Commitment

This level of customization is made possible by our commitment to full open-source development.

Installing any app from the Play Store results in automatic collection of crash reports, a feature that cannot be disabled. But if you download our app from GitHub, we have extra preference in the settings screen allowing you to disable even crash reporting.

Any technically advanced users can also examine our source code and ensure that there is no hidden data collection. Feel free to leave any feature requests and comments regarding quality on either the Play Store or GitHub — we’ll address them as soon as we can.

We hope you enjoy the fruits of our labor and look forward to the desktop version soon. Both mobile and desktop versions will implement P2P synchronization allowing you to keep your data up-to-date and private at the same time. Stay tuned!