Pharmacy opening hours — see what time the nearest pharmacy closes

You're rushing out for an antibiotic for your child at 9:40 PM. The closest pharmacy is five minutes away — but will you make it before they close? Or is it worth driving a little further to one that's open until 11:00 PM?

Since 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 a warning when a pharmacy is about to close. So you pick 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 open later today.

This feature complements the pharmacy map, which shows what's open right now. The map answers "where to go this minute"; this article answers "what time it closes, when it opens again, and whether it's open on a designated trading Sunday".

What you see on a pharmacy card

Every pharmacy has a one-line status under its address — no scrolling through schedules, no decoding seven rows of opening hours. Four cases are possible:

• "Open today until 22:00" — the pharmacy is open right now and we show when it will close.
• "Opens at 8:00" — the pharmacy is operating today but hasn't opened yet (early morning, lunch break, or a gap between two opening blocks).
• "Closed today" — the pharmacy isn't operating today (weekend, holiday, or an exceptional closure day).
• "Always open" — a 24h 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 color. 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 do I go at 3 AM".
• "Open today" — shows every pharmacy that is open or will still open today. An orange map marker indicates a pharmacy that opens later today (e.g. "Opens at 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 isn't carried by color alone (WCAG AA compliant).

The filters are mutually exclusive: turning on "24h only" disables the other two; "Open today" and "Show closed" cancel 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 24h pharmacies that stay open through midnight — "in 25 minutes" makes no sense when the place keeps trading anyway.

This way:

• the "closer but closing soon" decision is visible at a glance, no mental math,
• you can consciously choose a pharmacy that's farther away but open longer,
• and people using accessible transport, where 5 minutes of travel can mean 30 minutes of access and parking, get a real buffer.

Trading Sundays — Saturday-fallback

Many pharmacies leave Sunday blank in the Registry, since by default they're closed on Sundays. But on a designated trading Sunday (Polish "niedziela handlowa"), many of them actually do open — and they often run on 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 on a trading Sunday a pharmacy doesn't have its own Sunday hours in the Registry, 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". The decision whether to call before going is yours.
• Polish public holidays take precedence over a trading Sunday — when a trading Sunday coincides with a holiday (rare), the pharmacy is treated as if it's a holiday, that is, a regular 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 closing entirely or running 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 it's 11 November today — pharmacies that normally operate Monday–Saturday will automatically display "Closed today". For total certainty, turn on the "24h only" filter — you'll see only the ones running independently of the calendar.

How to use it, step by step

Navigation to the feature is the same as to the regular pharmacy map — everything is reachable from the inventory home 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. Pick a search radius: 2, 5, 10, or 25 km — the choice persists across sessions.
5. Pick 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 Center on dane.gov.pl. It's the same dataset that powers the pharmacy map described in this article.

On the server side, data is geocoded (each pharmacy gets a precise map position), opening hours are normalised (different Registry formats 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 computes distances, checks what's open, and decides whether to apply the Saturday-fallback on a Sunday.

The bundle refreshes once a day at night (cluster ETL) — the phone polls for updates once per calendar day. So 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 duty rosters under article 94 of the Polish Pharmacy Law. Those duties:

• are scheduled by powiat (county) councils for specific hours (e.g. 22:00–8:00 on a particular night),
• are not published in a single, central database — every powiat 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 powiat), turn on the "24h only" filter and head for one that's permanently open 24/7. The phone number is on the card — it's worth a quick call before you set out, just to confirm 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 status ("Open today until 22:00") — runs locally on your phone. We don't send your location to a server, we don't log queries like "I returned results in area X for you", and we don't keep a history of your pharmacy searches.

The timezone and holiday calendar are bundled into the data file as well — the feature works the same after you fly to another country (the app uses the system timezone) and just as well offline after the first bundle sync.

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 power both platforms once the implementation is ready.

How it connects to other features

Pharmacy opening hours work best as part of a broader home-pharmacy routine:

• Pharmacy map (open now) — the sibling feature, answers "where to go this minute",
• Low stock alerts — the system warns you before a medicine runs out, and you know where to head,
• PDF report for the doctor — with the medicine list in hand, it's easier to decide which pharmacy to drive to with the 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 phone call to the pharmacy staff — in case of an exceptional closure (a renovation day, a pharmacist's illness, an emergency duty), the Registry may not know. If certainty matters, call the pharmacy before you leave — the phone number is on the card, one tap dials it.

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 a deliberate decision: you know which one you'll reach in time, when they close, whether they're open on a trading Sunday, and whether to drive to the closer one or the farther one — because that one happens to be open until 11:00 PM.