This app lets you enter all the hyped sneaker raffles happening online

Since its relaunch in 2019, Sole Retriever has become a crucial tool for sneakerheads who want a one-stop shop to enter raffle-based drops on the internet. This is particularly useful at a time when COVID-19 (and bots) forced sneaker shops to experiment with their online releases, often opting for a lottery system that allows them to choose who can win the chance to buy a pair at random — and, at the same time, keep hypebeasts from lining up outside their store. For Sole Retriever, that presented the opportunity to offer a service that up until now had only been available on the web, but the company has just launched a fully loaded app that will let hypebeasts keep up with the latest sneaker raffles right from their iOS or Android device.

You get what you pay for — Although the newly minted app does cost $5 per month to access, unlike its website which is free, Sole Retriever told Input that’s because its mobile application isn’t simply a clone of its desktop product — it’s a completely fresh experience. For starters, you can have real-time, personalized notifications, which will alert you as soon as a raffle for a new sneaker is posted, as well as let you customize details like if you only want to know about lotteries happening in the U.S. or in-store versus online.

The most handy feature by far, however, is the autofill with custom profiles. That’s going to create a quick and seamless way for you to enter every sneaker raffle out there — which, for any given pair, can be dozens and dozens — and save you time entering your personal information. So, instead of going to a raffle page from different stores and having to type in your name, address, and more for each, you can just select the autofill option and move on to the next. And with the custom profiles, you can add the personal info of someone else whose info you may use to enter raffles on your behalf to increase your winning chances — like your girlfriend, boyfriend, husband, wife, mom, grandma, etc.

Additionally, the Sole Retriever app can save your logins for different retailers on its in-app browser, while the built-in release calendar gives you a detailed view of upcoming drops. Again, the theme here is to save you time and not have to login to sites or type your information in manually time and time again. Once you’re done with a raffle, you can mark it as “entered” directly on the app, making the entire process more manageable, efficient, and outright faster. If you enter sneaker raffles often, then you know how tedious it can be to keep up with all these different ones — and that’s the problem Sole Retriever is looking to solve with both its app and its site.

Gotta wait your turn — Unfortunately, you can’t just download the app from the Apple App Store or Google Play Store and hop right in, as there is a waitlist to get access to it. Sole Retriever says it will let people in on a “rolling basis” based on their waitlist position, though it is encouraging sneakerheads and hypebeasts to boost their position on the waitlist by referring the app to friends and sharing it on social media.

Once you do gain access to the Sole Retriever app, there is a seven-day free trial for you to decide whether you think the app is worth your $5 every month. In the meantime, Sole Retriever says it plans to update the app regularly and bring more features to it, based on feedback from users who will all be hoping its service is a window to as many sneaker Ws as possible. The company also said it is interested in being involved in every step of the raffle experience, hinting at what could be future collabs with retailers that would simplify the entire lottery process even further.