YahHeard

Petri Dish Agar

Grow something beautiful. Take notes.

  • Active Development
  • Mobile app
  • Simulation
  • Works offline

A microbiology sandbox simulation: culture colonies in a virtual petri dish, run experiments, log reactions and keep lab notes — fully offline.

View screenshots (5)Technical details
Petri Dish Agar home screen with options for free laboratory, guided experiments, saved experiments, substance library, reaction library, tutorials, settings and the safety notice
Home: a free laboratory, guided experiments and reference libraries.

Worth knowing

Petri Dish Agar is an educational simulation. Colony behaviour is a simplified deterministic model, not a substitute for real laboratory technique.

Screenshots

Captured from the release build running on an Android 14 emulator.

15

  • Home: a free laboratory, guided experiments and reference libraries.
  • A fresh dish, ready for the antibiotic inhibition experiment.
  • Choosing a dish, from a classic round plate to multi-well plates and slides.
  • Guided templates, each saying what you should expect to see.
  • The safety notice comes first: a model, not a lab protocol.

What Petri Dish is

Petri Dish Agar is a small science laboratory for your pocket. Seed a virtual agar dish, tune the conditions and watch colonies grow through deterministic simulation — then behave like a scientist about it: record experiment notes, log reactions and compare runs. The simulation mathematics are seeded and reproducible, so the same setup grows the same way twice, which makes real experimentation possible. The manifest explicitly removes the Internet permission: this lab is entirely yours.

What it does

  • Deterministic, reproducible colony growth simulation
  • Experiment notes and reaction logging
  • Tunable conditions per dish
  • Zero permissions — Internet explicitly removed
  • Fully offline

Reproducibility is the game mechanic

Seeded simulation means every run can be repeated exactly — change one variable, grow the dish again and the difference you see is the difference you made. That is the scientific method, disguised as a rather hypnotic screen.

Getting Petri Dish

Petri Dish Agar is still in development and is not distributed yet. It is roughly 45% of the way to a first public release.

At a glance

Status
Active Development
Runs on
Android
Offline use
Works offline
Package
com.petridish.agar
Last updated

Privacy

Petri Dish Agar requests no permissions at all — the Internet permission is explicitly removed in the manifest. Experiments and notes stay on your device.

Full privacy information for Petri Dish →

Permissions

This project requires no special permissions.

Support

Questions, bugs or ideas for Petri Dish?

Petri Dish support →

Technical details

Built with

  • Kotlin
  • Jetpack Compose
  • Hilt
  • Room
  • DataStore
  • Coil
  • WorkManager
  • kotlinx.serialization

How it is put together

  • A fixed-step microbiology simulation with experiment notes and reaction logs persisted in Room.
  • The manifest explicitly removes the INTERNET permission — a deliberate, verifiable offline signal.

Development workflow

Built through Claude Code and Codex.

Accessibility in the app

  • Colony states described in text alongside visuals
  • No time pressure — the simulation waits for you

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