Bürgerwecker

Bürgerwecker watches your city's appointment page for you. When a slot opens up that fits your request, you get a notification on your phone. You book it yourself, on the city's official page. The app never books anything.

How it works: 1. Pick a city and a service, for example applying for an ID card in Leipzig. 2. Narrow it down: locations, weekdays, time of day, how far ahead. 3. Allow notifications. That is all the app needs, no account, no email address.

As soon as a matching slot appears, the notification arrives. For every alert the app shows the earliest matching slot and a button to the city's booking page. Notifications from the last 30 days stay readable. A widget shows the earliest slot on your home screen.

An alert runs for 14 days. Shortly before it ends the app asks whether you are still looking and extends it if you want.

Covered: citizens' offices (Bürgeramt, Bürgerbüro), vehicle registration and driving licence offices and one registry office in 30 German cities, from Augsburg to Trier, among them Leipzig, Dresden, Nuremberg, Düsseldorf, Bonn and Münster. The app lists which cities and offices are in.

Bürgerwecker is an independent service and not affiliated with the cities. It only shows what is free on the official booking pages right now.

Privacy: the app needs your alerts and a device identifier for the notifications. No ads, no tracking, no account. What exactly is stored, and for how long, is at buergerwecker.de/datenschutz?lang=en.

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