Pharmacy opening hours — see what time the nearest pharmacy closes

You're rushing out for an antibiotic for your child at 21:40. The nearest pharmacy is five minutes away — but will you get there before it closes? Or is it worth driving a little further to one that's open until 23:00?

From version 1.7.0, the mojApteczka app shows full opening hours for every nearby pharmacy — not just "open / closed", but a clear status for today, a 7-day schedule, and warnings when a pharmacy is about to close. This helps you choose the one you can actually reach in time. If you're searching for a pharmacy in another city or along a route, the "Open today" filter shows pharmacies that are open now or will still be open later today.

This feature complements the pharmacy map, which shows which pharmacies are open right now. The map answers "where should I go right now"; this article answers "what time does the pharmacy close, when will it open again, and is it open on a trading Sunday too".

What you see on a pharmacy card

Every pharmacy has a one-line status under its address — no scrolling through policies, no decoding seven rows of opening hours. There are four possibilities:

• "Open today until 22:00" — the pharmacy is open right now and we show when it will close.
• "Open from 8:00" — the pharmacy is open today but has not opened yet (early morning, a midday break, or a gap between two opening blocks).
• "Closed today" — the pharmacy is not open today (for example, because of a weekend, holiday, or internal day off).
• "Open 24 hours" — a 24-hour pharmacy, open continuously. It also gets a blue 24h badge on the card and a blue marker on the map.

Below the status you'll find a "Show hours" toggle — it expands a 7-day grid with the current day highlighted in bold brand colour. Each day is shown as one or more time ranges (e.g. "8:00–13:00 · 16:00–20:00"), matching how hours are recorded in the Polish Pharmacy Registry.

Three filters that answer different questions

The locator now has three mutually exclusive chips above the result list. Each answers a different question:

• "24h only" — shows only pharmacies operating 24 hours a day, 7 days a week (about 200 of the 12,000+ entries in the Pharmacy Registry). The simplest answer to "where should I go at 3 in the morning".
• "Open today" — shows every pharmacy that is open now or will be open later today. An orange map marker indicates a pharmacy that opens later today (e.g. "Open from 16:00"). Ideal when you're planning to leave in an hour and want to know where to go.
• "Show closed" — also shows pharmacies that are closed right now. The card gets a grey "Closed now" chip and a grey marker on the map, so the open/closed signal is not carried by colour alone (WCAG AA compliance).

The filters are mutually exclusive: turning on "24h only" disables the other two; "Open today" and "Show closed" exclude each other. That way you always know exactly what question the result list is answering.

"Closing in X min" — so you don't drive there for nothing

If a pharmacy will close within the next 30 minutes, the card displays an orange "Closing in X min" badge and the map marker turns orange. The warning is not shown for 24-hour pharmacies that stay open through midnight — "in 25 minutes" makes no sense when the pharmacy will simply open again straight away.

This way:

• the "nearer, but closing soon" decision is visible at a glance, with no mental arithmetic,
• you can deliberately choose a pharmacy you can reach in time instead of the nearest one whose opening hours are about to end,
• and people using transport for people with reduced mobility, where 5 minutes of travel can mean 30 minutes of access and parking, get a real time buffer.

Trading Sundays — Saturday-fallback

Many pharmacies leave the Sunday field blank in the Registry, since they are usually closed on Sundays. But on a trading Sunday (Polish "niedziela handlowa"), many of them do open — and they often follow Saturday hours.

mojApteczka handles this automatically:

• The app knows the calendar of trading Sundays in Poland (seven dates a year: the last Sunday of January, April, June, and August; the Sunday before Easter; and the two Sundays before Christmas).
• If a pharmacy does not have its own Sunday hours in the Registry on a trading Sunday, we display its Saturday hours as the likely schedule for the day.
• A footer notice on the card reads "Today is a trading Sunday — hours may follow Saturday's schedule". You decide whether to call before setting out.
• Polish public holidays take precedence over a trading Sunday — if a trading Sunday coincides with a holiday (rare), the pharmacy is treated as it would be on a holiday, in practice like a Sunday.

Polish public holidays treated as Sundays

On a public holiday (1 and 3 May, Corpus Christi, 15 August, 1 and 11 November, 25-26 December and the rest of the statutory days off), most pharmacies follow Sunday rules — either they do not open at all or they run shorter hours.

The app fetches the official holiday calendar in advance and treats every holiday as a Sunday in the opening schedule. You don't have to remember that today is 11 November — pharmacies that normally operate Monday–Saturday will automatically display "Closed today". For extra certainty, turn on the "24h only" filter — you'll see only the ones that operate independently of the calendar.

How to use it, step by step

Navigation to the feature is the same as for the regular pharmacy map — everything is available from the home medicine cabinet screen:

1. Open mojApteczka and go to the Inventory tab.
2. Tap "Find pharmacy" — the button sits right above "Check interactions".
3. Allow location access (one-time, on first launch).
4. Choose a search radius: 2, 5, 10, or 25 km — the setting is remembered between sessions.
5. Choose the filter that fits your situation: "24h only", "Open today", or "Show closed".
6. Tap a pharmacy in the list — you'll see today's hours under the address. Tap "Show hours" to expand the full weekly schedule.
7. Tap "Navigate" to send the route to Apple Maps or Google Maps — depending on what you have installed.

Where the opening hours come from

Pharmacy data — addresses, phone numbers, opening hours, 24h status — is downloaded daily from the Polish Pharmacy Registry (Rejestr Aptek), published by the e-Health Centre on dane.gov.pl. It's the same dataset that powers the pharmacy map described in this article.

On the server side, the data is geocoded (each pharmacy gets a precise map position), opening hours are normalised (different Registry formats are consolidated into a unified 7-day schedule), and the trading-Sunday and public-holiday calendars are bundled in. The phone receives a prepared data bundle (~580 KB), then locally calculates distances, checks what is open, and decides whether to apply the Saturday-fallback on a Sunday.

The bundle is refreshed once a day at night (cluster ETL) — the phone checks for updates once per calendar day. This means the hours you see are at most one calendar day behind the Registry.

A 24h pharmacy is not the same as an on-duty pharmacy

The opening-hours feature shows regular, recurring hours for each pharmacy plus 24h status. It does not show rotating pharmacy duty rosters under article 94 of the Polish Pharmaceutical Law. Those duties:

• are set by county councils for specific hours (e.g. 22:00–8:00 on a particular night),
• are not published in a single, central database — every county maintains its own,
• aren't in the Pharmacy Registry, so mojApteczka cannot surface them automatically.

In practice: if you're looking for a pharmacy at night or on a holiday and don't want to rely on a duty roster (which may be in a different county), turn on the "24h only" filter and go to one that is permanently open 24/7. The phone number is on the card — it's worth calling before you set out to confirm that a specific medicine is in stock.

Privacy — opening hours computed on your device

Everything described above — comparing the current time against the schedule of every one of the 12,000 pharmacies, deciding whether to apply Saturday-fallback on a trading Sunday, classifying the status ("Open today until 22:00") — happens locally on your phone. We don't send your location to a server, we don't log queries such as "I showed you results near X", and we don't keep a history of your pharmacy searches.

The time zone and holiday calendar are also built into the data bundle — the feature works the same after you fly to another country (where the app uses the system time zone) and works the same offline after the first bundle synchronisation.

Availability

Full opening hours, the "Open today" and "Show closed" filters, and the trading-Sunday Saturday-fallback are available in mojApteczka for iOS from version 1.7.0. The Android version is in development — the same server bundle will support both platforms once the implementation is ready.

How it connects to other features

Pharmacy opening hours work best as part of a broader home medicine cabinet routine:

• Pharmacy map (open now) — the sibling feature, answers "where to go this minute",
• Low medicine stock — the system warns you before a medicine runs out, and you know where to go,
• PDF report for the doctor — with the medicine list in hand, it's easier to quickly decide which pharmacy to go to for a new prescription,
• Offline SPC documentation — on the way to the pharmacy you can check a medicine's SmPC even without coverage,
• Offline dispensing — if you collect a medicine for a patient, you can record the dose even without a network.

An important caveat

Opening hours come from the Pharmacy Registry, refreshed once a day. They don't replace a conversation with pharmacy staff — in the event of an exceptional closure (for example, a renovation day, a pharmacist's illness, or an emergency duty), the Registry may not know. If certainty matters, call the pharmacy before you leave — the phone number is on the details card, and one tap starts the call.

Note: the trading-Sunday calendar in Poland changes by statute. The app uses the calendar in force in the year it last fetched the bundle — if the law changes, we update the list and the bundle reaches the device through the daily sync.

The pharmacy opening hours feature in mojApteczka turns finding an open pharmacy into an informed decision: you know which one you'll reach in time, when they close, whether they also open on a trading Sunday, and whether it is worth going to the nearer one or the farther one — because that one happens to be open until 23:00.