Support — Footnote

Footnote keeps a quiet record of where you have been. It runs in the background, draws your trail, works out which city you are in, and writes the visit down.

Three screens. The Journal is the diary — a month calendar tinted by the cities you were in, and below it a timeline of days with how long you spent in each and how you travelled between them. The Dashboard is today. Stats is the long view: cities, states, countries and miles, your most-visited places, first visits by year, time abroad, and a dot map of the US.

Everything is stored on the phone. No account, no server, no sync, no analytics — see the privacy policy for the full detail.

This is version 0.9, shared with a handful of testers, and it behaves like it. Some numbers are approximate and some edges are rough. Those are listed near the bottom of this page rather than hidden.

Exporting your data

Tap the gear in the top-right of any tab, then under Transfer choose Export Location History and confirm. The share sheet opens with a JSON file you can save to Files, AirDrop, or mail to yourself.

The file contains every route with all its points, and every city visit. It does not include your settings, your home city, or manual travel-mode corrections — so those will not survive a wipe-and-reimport.

Two things to know. The Export button is greyed out if Routes recorded reads 0, so a phone whose history came only from a Roam import has nothing to export. And the file is written to a temporary folder that Footnote empties on every launch — if you dismiss the share sheet without saving it somewhere, it is gone.

Deleting your history

Everything — gear, then the Delete section at the bottom, then Delete All Data. Removes all routes, points, city visits, tier logs and travel-mode corrections, clears your home city, and starts recording again from empty. It cannot be undone.
One city on one day — in the Journal, press and hold the city's name in that day's card and choose Delete. Days either side of a longer stay are kept. Today's live row has no such menu; you cannot delete the visit you are currently inside.
The app itself — deleting Footnote removes all of it, since none of it lives anywhere else.

Setting your home city

Gear, then Home City. Either tap Set to Current Location, or type into the search field and tap a suggestion.

Changing it later is slightly awkward: once a home is set, the search field is replaced by the current home and a Clear Home City button. To move home to a city you are not standing in, clear it first and the search field comes back. Set to Current Location works either way.

Your home city gets a HOME pill in Stats and a green dot on the US map, its City Detail switches to an "Away This Year" list, the Dashboard hero reads "home · since …", the Abroad card is measured against your home country, and city names in your own country drop the country suffix. All of it updates immediately.

Turning off the interruption notification

Gear, then Notifications, then switch off Tracking interruption alerts. That is the only notification Footnote sends: it fires after 24 hours in which the app has neither been opened nor woken in the background. It is a dead-man switch rather than a fault report — a phone left in a drawer trips it too.

Switching it off cancels the pending alert immediately and clears one already sitting in Notification Center. It does not affect tracking.

When tracking seems to have stopped

Check the Dashboard first — the top card is the status light. Pulsing green "TRACKING" means it is running. Amber "INTERRUPTED" means a gap was found at launch. Grey "NOT TRACKING" means there is no open visit at all.

In the Journal, today's card shows a pulsing "now" while recording and a grey "paused" when the app has decided you are sitting still. Paused is normal. It is what makes all-day tracking affordable, and real movement wakes it — there is nothing to restart.

For harder evidence: the Data section at the top of Settings shows Routes recorded and Location points. Take a ten-minute walk with the app closed and look again. If the point count has not moved, something is genuinely wrong.

The fix is nearly always permission scope. In iOS Settings → Privacy & Security → Location Services → Footnote, confirm it is set to Always with Precise Location on. Footnote deliberately asks for "While Using" first and only proposes the upgrade a few minutes into a session, so it is easy to end up stuck on While Using — which stops the trail the moment you leave the app.

The interruption banner

It appears at the top of the Journal: "Tracking was interrupted — Footnote was closed for 16 hours, 40 minutes. Your trail resumes now."

It means that when the app launched, the newest stored point was more than twelve hours old — direct evidence the app was not running. Nothing is lost except the movements it could not see. The duration is an upper bound: if you sat still for three hours before it died, those hours are inside the number.

The same trigger quietly does one more thing. If a city visit was still open when tracking died, it is closed at the last real evidence rather than claiming you were there the whole time — so you do not come back to "still in Asheville" after a week away. If you never left, the next confirmation reopens that same visit instead of creating a duplicate, and it reads as one continuous stay.

Known rough edges

The interruption banner is cleared by the first usable GPS fix, which often arrives within seconds — so a real, long outage can vanish before you see it, especially if the app opened on Dashboard or Stats. If you suspect one and missed the banner, the Journal timeline is the honest record.
Stays are grouped into one block using an overnight rule measured against your phone's current time zone, which can put the night boundary in the wrong place while you are travelling far from home.
A new city has to hold for an hour before Footnote commits to it, so arriving somewhere and immediately opening the app will still show the city you came from.
The Dashboard and Stats hold their numbers for a minute before recomputing. Leaving the tab and coming back forces a refresh.
Battery cost is real. Footnote pauses when you are still, batches its writes, and ignores low-quality fixes — but an app that records your position all day costs more than one that does not.

Getting in touch

support@myfootnot.es

If you are reporting a tracking problem, the most useful things to include are: what the Dashboard status card said, what Location points read in Settings before and after, and a screenshot of iOS Settings → Battery showing Footnote's share.