Flinker vs Heirloom Tree
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
Flinker
Collaboratively build and explore your family tree with relatives. Add rich profiles, track birthdays, and discover family insights. This app offers a private, interactive space to connect with your family history.
- Collaborative family tree building
- Rich relative profiles
- Automatic birthday reminders
- Interactive tree exploration
- Private family spaces
- Family insights and statistics
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Flinker is the modern way to build your family tree — together. Most family history apps feel like research software. Flinker feels like a family app. Invite your relatives, build your tree as a team, and stay connected around the people who matter most. BUILD A TREE THAT'S TRULY YOURS • Add relatives with rich profiles: birthdays, photos, careers, education, languages spoken, hobbies, and the places they've lived. • Explore a beautiful, interactive tree you can pan and zoom. • Built for real families, including complex branches. INVITE YOUR WHOLE FAMILY • Share a private family space with a simple invite link. • Everyone contributes what they know, so your tree grows faster and stays accurate. • Owner, contributor, and viewer roles keep everything organized. NEVER MISS A BIRTHDAY • Automatic birthday reminders, delivered in your own time zone. • See who's celebrating next and plan ahead. DISCOVER YOUR FAMILY IN NUMBERS • Insightful statistics about your tree: members, generations, weddings, and more. • Birthday heatmaps, top locations, hobbies, and languages across your family. PRIVATE BY DESIGN • Your family data lives in your private family space. • You decide who to invite and what they can do. AVAILABLE IN YOUR LANGUAGE Flinker is translated into many languages and adapts to your device, including right-to-left layouts. Start your tree today and bring your whole family together in one place.
Heirloom Tree
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Dedicated to the Lin family, and to every family — with wishes of health and peace. Heirloom Tree is a completely free family record app. No subscriptions. No in-app purchases. No ads. No accounts. Your family's story, written down well enough to pass on. Every family has a root system. This app is for the families who want to keep theirs. ■Why we built this The oldest storytellers in every family don't live forever. The names, the villages, the photos, the small details — if no one writes them down, they're gone. We made Heirloom Tree so every child can carry their family tree in their pocket: ancestors, origins, the generation poem, the faces of grandparents, where the family came from. This is our gift to the Lin family, and to every family. ■What it does ◆ Print your family tree as a PDF (lead feature) • One tap turns your whole tree into a print-ready PDF: genogram + generational register. • A4, A3, portrait or landscape. Pages split automatically — no one gets sliced in half. • Print it for Lunar New Year, bind it for the family altar, mail it to relatives overseas. A real family book, starting from you. ◆ Family tree (genogram) • Standard notation: square □ for male, circle ○ for female. Generations stack clearly, birth order left to right. • Parents, spouses, children — every relationship visible. The deceased belong on the tree too. • A double frame marks "me." From your own perspective, a concentric view shows how everyone relates to you. • Children who died young, pregnancies that didn't carry, relatives lost to time — they all keep a small place on the tree. Every life belongs to the family. ◆ Kinship calculator (Chinese-style cousin terms, plus English) • Type a path — "my dad's cousin's daughter" — and get the answer: second cousin. (The English cousin system is included; the full Chinese 親屬稱謂 grid is a Chinese heritage feature.) • Useful for figuring out what to call relatives at weddings, funerals, and family gatherings. ◆ Generation Poem (昭穆, Chinese heritage feature) • Enter your family's generational poem. The app tags each member with their generation and their generational character. • See a cousin's name and immediately know which generation they're from. • Overseas Chinese families who use the English interface still need this — it stays front and centre. ◆ Surname origins (first release: Lin 林) • Built-in reading content: the origin of 林 as a surname, the Xi He 西河 hall, Lin families in Fujian, Mazu (Lin Mo-niang) 媽祖, and migration from China to Taiwan. • More surnames (Chen, Huang, Zhang, Wang…) will be added in a future version. • For other locales, a short "What is a surname origin?" explainer is included alongside the Lin content. ◆ Remembrance dates (anniversaries of passing) • Local notifications for anniversaries of passing, Memorial Day-style commemorations. • Lunar calendar support for Chinese-heritage families — grandparents' dates will not be missed. ◆ Your data, fully yours • JSON backup and GEDCOM export — standard formats that work with other genealogy software. • No cloud lock-in. No account. No phone tether. ■Where it's going The current version is a quiet, complete, single-device family tree tool. A future version will add cloud sync and shared family editing. After that, relative matching to help you find long-lost branches of your family. But no matter which version ships next, free, no ads, your data is yours — these three things will never change. Dedicated to the Lin family, and to every family — with wishes of health and peace. Write down your roots. Pass the story on.
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is update cadence: Heirloom Tree at every 3 days against Flinker's every 6 days. Flinker's advantage is iOS requirement (15.0 vs 17.0). On price, ads, in-app purchases and device support there is nothing between them.
Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS
Both are free to download. Neither carries in-app purchases, so what you see is what you pay.
Flinker ships an update every 6 days, Heirloom Tree every 3 days. The most recent releases landed on October 7, 2026 and September 29, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | Flinker | Heirloom Tree |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | 5.0 (1 ratings) — better | — |
| Number of ratings | 1 — better | — |
| Update frequency | Every 6 days | Every 3 days — better |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | No | No |
| Monetization | Free | — |
| Devices | iPhone, iPod | iPhone, iPad |
| Requires iOS | 15.0 — better | 17.0 |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 58 MB | 9 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | MOHAMED MAHFOUD | PEICHEN LIN |
In-app purchases
Flinker
No in-app purchases
Heirloom Tree
No in-app purchases







