About this app

It's the Owly -the little wise owl- who will bring a fun (and hopefully useful) fact every day to your phone, either as a notification or to display on your phone screen!

You can swipe fact cards to see fact images. You can vote facts by tapping on 'like' or 'dislike' buttons.

As you collect more facts everyday, you'll be able to scroll to see the previous ones.

We value your feedback - if you have any issues regarding to the app or any particular fact, please use the 'report fact' icon to tell us!

Thanks for using Owly!

✤ The founders of Google were willing to sell Google for $1 million to Excite in 1999, but Excite turned them down. Google (Alphabet) is now worth $766 Billion (at the time of writing, August 2018!)

✤ Charlie Chaplin once lost a Charlie Chaplin look-alike contest. In 1975, several years before his death, Chaplin entered a look-alike contest of himself in France. He probably thought he was a shoo-in for the prize and everyone would have a hearty laugh at the end. But then he came in third.

✤ Foreign accent syndrome (FAS) is speech disorder that causes a sudden change to speech so that a native speaker is perceived to speak with a “foreign” accent. FAS is most often caused by damage to the brain caused by a stroke or traumatic brain injury.

✤ Reed Hastings (CEO of Netflix) said he got the idea for Netflix after having to pay $40 in late fees for returning a movie late. The story has been discredited by the company's co-founder. Instead, he claims the two wanted to create 'the Amazon.com of something' and settled on DVDs.

✤ In ancient Egypt, servants were smeared with honey to attract flies away from the pharaoh. Do you know anyone that you would be OK to do that? Upon dying, some pharaohs were sealed into their tombs alongside their living servants, pets, and concubines.

✤ The Aztecs made human sacrifices to the gods. In 1487, at the dedication of the temple in Tenochtitlan, 20,000 people were put to death. The Mayans also made sacrifices. The most common involved pulling a still-beating heart out of a victim's chest.

✤ Armadillos are small sized mammals roughly chipmunk-sized at 13–15 cm (5.1–5.9 in) in total length. Armadillo shells are bulletproof. One Texas man was hospitalized when a bullet he shot at an armadillo ricocheted off the animal and hit him!

✤ The American flag was designed by a high school student. It started as a school project for Bob Heft’s junior-year history class, and it only earned a B- in 1958. After President Eisenhower called to say his design was approved, Heft’s teacher changed his grade to an A.

✤ The Eiffel Tower can grow more than six inches (approx 15 cm) during the summer: The high temperatures make the iron expand! Standing 984 feet (300 meters) high upon completion on March 15, 1889, the Eiffel Tower became the world’s tallest structure.

✤ The bomb dropped over Hiroshima was a uranium gun-type atomic bomb with codename ‘Little Boy’ while the one dropped on Nagasaki was a plutonium implosion-type atomic bomb with codename ‘Fat Man’. Codenames are chosen according to the design shapes of the bombs.

New features

Minor improvements.

App Permissions

Allows applications to open network sockets.
Allows applications to access information about networks.
Allows an application to receive the ACTION_BOOT_COMPLETED that is broadcast after the system finishes booting.
Allows access to the vibrator.
Allows an application to read from external storage.
Allows using PowerManager WakeLocks to keep processor from sleeping or screen from dimming.