Frequently Asked Questions

Basic Setup & Permissions

Why do I need "Always" location permission and Background App Refresh?

MeTrail is not a live navigation app. It relies on iOS visit events and geofences to fill in arrivals, departures, and stay durations in the background. With only "While Using the App", visits and reminders while the phone is locked or the app is in the background will be incomplete.

Steps:

  1. Open iOS Settings > Privacy & Security > Location Services > MeTrail, choose Always, and turn on Precise Location.
  2. Open iOS Settings > General > Background App Refresh and make sure MeTrail is on.
  3. Back in the app, check the current status in Today > Settings > Privacy & Security > Location Permission.

Why aren't notifications showing, and how do I restore permissions after denying them?

Arrival and departure reminders need both system notification permission and the in-app switch. After you decline once, iOS stops prompting, so you have to restore it in Settings.

Steps:

  1. Open iOS Settings > MeTrail > Notifications and enable Allow Notifications.
  2. Open Today > Settings > Notifications, turn on Enable Notifications, and set the arrival and departure sounds and Notify arrival at the same location as needed.
  3. If you denied location access earlier, restore it in iOS Settings > Privacy & Security > Location Services > MeTrail.

Notes:

  • Reminders are triggered by location events. Focus modes and Low Power Mode can delay them.
  • If one place notifies you too often, turn off Notify arrival at the same location first.

How do I change arrival and departure messages?

Open Today > Settings > Notifications > Arrival and Departure Reminders. Under Message Content, open Arrival Message or Departure Message. Styles are Standard, Concise, and Narrative, each with a preview; you can also turn on Show Areas and Show City, and the departure message can Include Arrival Time.

Notes:

  • Areas come from the memberships you give a place and are omitted when there are none. Leaving a place does not mean leaving its whole area.
  • Previews do not send a notification, and changing a style does not resend past reminders.

How do I turn on Review Reminders?

Review Reminders remind you to revisit the weekly and monthly reviews on the Review tab after each period ends. They fire on the device's local time.

Steps:

  1. Open Today > Settings > Notifications > Review Reminders, turn on Weekly Review Reminder or Monthly Review Reminder, and set the weekday, day, and time.
  2. You can also turn them on from the bottom of a weekly or monthly review on the Review tab.

Notes:

  • Notifications show a summary only, never specific places.

How do I show my current stay on the Lock Screen and in the Dynamic Island?

Once this is on, any stay in progress shows the place name and the time since you arrived on the Lock Screen and in the Dynamic Island, and it disappears when the stay ends. It pairs with arrival and departure alerts: one posts a notification when you arrive, the other stays up for the whole stay.

Steps:

  1. Open Today > Settings > Notifications and turn on Show Current Stay in the Live Activity group.
  2. To hide or shorten the place name, adjust Place Display in Today > Settings > Interface > Widgets; the Lock Screen follows the same setting.

Notes:

  • iOS limits how often a Live Activity refreshes, so the timer may lag slightly during a very long stay.

Location Recording Accuracy

Why doesn't a visit appear in real time, and why can departure time show up later?

This is normal. MeTrail uses iOS visit detection rather than locating you every second. It usually records the arrival first, then fills in the departure time and stay duration once the system confirms you left or reached the next stop. When you reopen the app, queued events are written in.

Steps:

  1. Open the Today tab, or Activities from the top-right menu of the Review tab, to see the latest records.
  2. If nothing updates for a long time, check Today > Settings > Privacy & Security > Location Permission and the system background settings.
  3. If arrivals and departures are consistently late, open Today > Settings > General > Tracking and change Tracking Mode from Power Saving to Balanced or Precise.

Notes:

  • Power Saving is the default and uses only the system's visit detection, so arrivals and departures are usually logged ten to thirty minutes late. Balanced and Precise shorten that delay. All three need Always location; the app can stay in the background.
  • Precise confirms a stay by the place's matching range: walking around inside the same campus or mall still counts as one stay, and you leave only when you step outside the range.

How do I make location matching more accurate and reduce duplicate visits?

Place matching range decides which existing place a stay belongs to; it does not change location accuracy. A larger range tolerates more drift but can merge neighboring places, while a small range may split one place into several.

Steps:

  1. Open Today > Settings > General > Place matching range and pick a preset or a custom radius. 500 meters suits Power Saving and Balanced; try 300 meters with Precise.
  2. For a large mall, campus, or park, open the place's More actions and use Expand Matching Range for that place alone; use Adjust Location when the coordinates are wrong and Refresh Address when the name is wrong.
  3. If you already have a chain of near-duplicate records, check that Today > Settings > General > Logic > Automatically merge nearby visits at the same place is on, or open Today > Settings > Maintenance Tools and tap Run Merge Now.

Notes:

  • Switching tracking modes applies that mode's suggested radius; you can still change it afterward.
  • Changes apply to incoming records only and do not rematch saved history.

Data Management & Security

How do I enable iCloud Sync and Sync Drive?

iCloud Sync syncs visit data to your iCloud. Sync Drive syncs photos and other files, and shows backup and restore entries once it is on.

Steps:

  1. Open Today > Settings > iCloud Sync and turn on iCloud Sync.
  2. To sync photos and files, also turn on Sync Drive and use the backup and restore buttons on the page.

Notes:

  • All devices must be signed in to the same Apple ID.
  • Sync runs asynchronously, so the first sync takes a little time after you turn it on.

How do I turn on App Lock and use Face ID or Touch ID for faster unlock?

App Lock shows a lock screen on cold start and when the app returns to the foreground after the timeout, and covers the App Switcher snapshot while the app is in the background.

Steps:

  1. Open Today > Settings > Privacy & Security, turn on App Lock, and set a 6-digit passcode.
  2. On supported devices, enable Face ID or Touch ID on the same page and adjust Lock Timing as needed.
  3. Changing the passcode, turning App Lock off, or recovering from a forgotten passcode all happen on the same page after verification.

Notes:

  • App Lock is configured per device and is not synced through iCloud.
  • Forgetting the passcode does not delete visit data; after device owner verification you can set a new one.

How do I export visit data, and which formats are available?

Advanced Export supports CSV, JSON, TXT, GPX, and KML, filtered by date range, favorite status, and archived status. Exporting JSON alone produces a single JSON package, the right input for Web Viewer; to keep several formats together, ZIP is the better archive. The quick export in the Review tab and the location menu produces the same JSON package when you choose JSON.

Steps:

  1. Open Today > Settings > Advanced Export, choose a date range, and enable Favorites only or Archived only if needed.
  2. Select the formats, and turn on Include notes or Compress to zip when needed.
  3. Tap Export in the top-right corner, then save or send the file through the system share sheet. If the export fails, an alert offers Retry.

Notes:

  • When weather at arrival is enabled, the weather is included in the JSON package and in CSV and TXT.

Core Feature Guide

How do Today Overview and visit sharing work together?

Today Overview is the day's map with a panel that stays on screen, holding the daily summary and timeline. Sharing generates a map image with a text summary.

Steps:

  1. Open the Today tab. The panel header below the map shows the day's place count and stay duration; drag the panel to switch between collapsed, half, and full height.
  2. Tap a visit in the timeline to locate the place on the map; the panel switches to that place's photos and visits for the day. Long-press a visit to favorite it, add notes or tags, share it, or open its details.
  3. To jot down a thought about the stay that just ended, long-press its row in the timeline and choose notes.
  4. Tap … next to the panel title and choose Share Today's Trajectory; it goes through the system share sheet.
  5. Tap the map button at the top right of the map to open Choose Map, switch between Standard and Satellite, and toggle geofences, movement paths, points of interest, and location names.

Notes:

  • The Review group at the bottom of the panel shows Continue Review, On This Day, and Time Review below the timeline. Turn it off in Today > Settings > Interface > Home Screen. On This Day shows where you stayed longest one year ago today, or last month when there is nothing from last year, and can be turned off on its own.

How do I look back at a trip?

Stay away from your home city for at least two days and Footprints gathers those days into a trip. Your home city comes from your visit pattern, so there is nothing to set; trips cannot be created by hand, and adding a missed visit updates the trip automatically.

Steps:

  1. Open the Footprints tab and switch to Trips at the top; they are grouped by year. Month, Quarter, and Year Reviews and city and country pages also list that period's trips.
  2. Tap a trip for its details: photo cover and highlights, the trip map, city and place counts, total stay duration, and a day-by-day timeline with city and weather.
  3. From the top-right menu, Find Photos in Library matches your library by the trip's dates and places; the ones you check become trip photos and the cover updates on its own.
  4. Trip Story renders the whole trip as one long image; Share Trip builds a share card, with a Photo template when the trip has photos.
  5. The same menu offers Rename and Copy Shortcut, which copies a link to this trip for Shortcuts or Notes.

Notes:

  • Finding photos requires photo library access. Matching uses only capture time and location, and no photo is uploaded.
  • With Smart Summaries on, the trip name and opening line are generated; Regenerate and Restore Default Title are in the top-right menu.
  • Shortcuts includes an Open Trips action that jumps straight to the trip list.

How do I open the Quarter Review, Year Review, and Year Story?

Both open from a monthly review: on the Review tab, open a monthly review and use the Quarter Review and Year Review rows below the places list. Like a monthly review, each shows active days, frequent places, and days worth revisiting; the arrows next to the title move to the previous or next period, and tapping a day takes you back to that day in the calendar. Once a period has ended you can compare it with the previous one; the comparison is hidden when the previous period has no visits.

In the Year Review, a sparkle button next to the title opens the Year Story: a one-line summary, active days and visits, where you stayed longest, places new this year, footprints by month, and a closing line. The share button in the top right renders the whole page as one tall image and hands it to the system share sheet.

Notes:

  • Quarter and Year Reviews have no separate reminder.

How do I see the weather at arrival in visit details?

Turn on Record weather at arrival in Today > Settings > General > Visit Behavior. After that, each new visit fetches the weather for its arrival hour once it is saved, and the Details section of the visit shows a Weather at arrival row. Data comes from Apple Weather.

Notes:

  • Only visits created after the switch is turned on get weather; existing visits are not backfilled. Fetching needs a network connection and is retried automatically on failure.
  • A share card for a visit with weather includes it. To leave it out, turn off Show weather in the ... menu of the share card editor.

How do I see how often I travel between cities?

City Moves counts every move from one city to another, which makes business-trip frequency, trips home, and your most common routes easy to read. Moves within a city are not counted.

Steps:

  1. Open a Month, Quarter, or Year Review on the Review tab and find the City Moves section for the total count and the most common route.
  2. Tap See All for the full list, switching between By Time and By Route at the top. Date Filter narrows the range, and the top-right menu offers Share Text and Export CSV.
  3. A city page's Comings and Goings section lists every move in and out of that city; a place page's lists the trips between that place and others, marked via N stops when you passed other places on the way.

How do I browse every record for a place, city, or area?

Place, city, and area detail pages show only recent visits. To go further back, open All Records, which groups visits by month and loads earlier months as you scroll.

Steps:

  1. Tap See All in the visits section of a detail page.
  2. Use the search field to look up notes and place names; the top-right menu offers filters, sorting (Newest, Oldest, Longest Stay), and a date range.
  3. A place's Memories section shows 3 photos; tap the last cell for the visit photos page, grouped by visit, where each group opens its visit.
  4. An area page has a Notes section for describing the area (long press to copy or share) and an Area Map section with switchable layers; tap the preview for the full-screen map.

How do I categorize places and see time and places by category?

Each place can go into one of 12 categories such as Dining, Shopping, or Outdoors. When a stop is named, the category comes along from the Apple Maps result, and you can change it by hand. Once places are categorized, the Categories section on the Places tab lists them by category, and Review shows how your time splits across categories.

Steps:

  1. Open Place details > More > Set Category, long-press a row in the place list, or select several places and set them at once from the bottom toolbar. Home and Work can only be set by hand.
  2. On the Places tab, tap a category in the Categories section to open its place list, with this year's monthly stay trend at the top.
  3. Open a weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly review on the Review tab and look at the Time by Category section; tap a row to open that category's places.
  4. For existing places without a category, open Today > Settings > Maintenance Tools > Match Place Categories to fill them in; a category is written only when a nearby Apple Maps result has the same name.

Notes:

  • Categories you set by hand are never changed by Match Place Categories.
  • The icon before a stay's title on the timeline is the place's category.

How do I search places, cities, tags, and past visits?

There are two entry points: search on the Places tab is for managing your place library and finding places, cities, and tags; visit search on the Search tab is for recalling a specific experience.

Steps:

  1. On the Places tab, search from the field at the top and narrow results with Favorites, Frequent, With Notes, Tagged, Long Stay, and Recent; you can also switch results by city.
  2. On the Search tab, type a place name, tag, or note keyword, or tap a row under Filters (Has Photo, Has Note, Today, This Week, This Month) to browse memories without a keyword.
  3. Each chosen condition becomes a token in the search field; delete the token to drop it. To combine, type another filter name after the token and tap the matching row. The top of the results states the current conditions.
  4. View Options at the top of the results sorts by Newest or Oldest and groups by Date or Place Type.
  5. You can put a time right in the keyword, such as last month cafe, March Shanghai, or past 7 days; it becomes a time token and filters results.

Notes:

  • Place, city, and visit search each keep their own Recent Searches.

Advanced Features

How do I adjust what the home screen shows?

The five bottom tabs (Today, Footprints, Review, Places, Search) are fixed and cannot be hidden or reordered. What you can adjust are the Review group at the bottom of the Today panel and the home screen widgets.

Steps:

  1. Open Today > Settings > Interface and toggle Review in the Home Screen group; while it is on you can toggle On This Day separately.
  2. Home screen widgets are under Widgets in the same group.
  3. On iPhone you can also turn on Navigation > Automatically minimize the tab bar to free up room for content when scrolling down.

How do I turn on Smart Summaries, and what data does it send?

Smart Summaries is off by default and ships with no built-in service: you provide an OpenAI-compatible endpoint, and requests go straight from your phone to that address. MeTrail never relays or stores them. Once on, a one-line summary appears on the Today card, review titles get an opening line, and trip names and tag suggestions are generated; anything with a sparkles mark was generated.

Steps:

  1. Open Today > Settings > Intelligence and turn on Enable Intelligence.
  2. Under Service, pick OpenAI, DeepSeek, OpenRouter, Ollama, or Custom, fill in the address, model, and API key, then tap Test Connection.
  3. The first use shows a privacy notice; nothing is sent until you confirm it.
  4. In the Privacy group decide whether to turn on Mask Place Names, and use What Will Be Sent to see the exact payload for each scenario. In the Scenarios group toggle Today headline, Period review opening, Trip naming, Tag suggestions, Natural language search, and Year story narrative.

Notes:

  • Only summaries are sent: place names, cities, dates and hours, stay durations, counts, tags, and search text. Coordinates, addresses, notes, and photos are never sent.
  • With Mask Place Names on, place names become Home, Work, or Place A before sending; city names stay.
  • Turning off Enable Intelligence stops all requests and hides generated summaries, while your endpoint, key, and scenario settings are kept.
  • Long press a generated summary to regenerate or copy it.

How do tags, Visit Archives, notes, and photos work together?

Tags organize visits, archives temporarily hide visits from the main timeline, and notes and photos add the details behind each visit.

Steps:

  1. Open Today > Settings > Tags to create the tags you use most. When tagging a visit, the picker always offers Create Tag, and if you have none yet, Create Default Tags adds a starter set.
  2. In Visit detail > More actions, use Visit Notes, Add Photos, and Edit Tags. Add Photos lets you pick from your library or find photos taken during this stay near the place.
  3. In Location detail > More actions, use Edit Location Name, Edit Notes, Add Location Photos, and View All Photos to keep place photos separate from visit memories; Delete a place you no longer need from the same menu.
  4. Open Today > Settings > Visit Archives to see hidden visits, tap Restore to bring one back, and use Delete Permanently or Empty Archive only when you are sure.

Notes:

  • Archiving does not delete a visit. It stays in Visit Archives until you restore it or delete it permanently.
  • Visit notes support Markdown.

How do I notify another app when I arrive or leave?

Hook Automation sends an HTTP request to your own service on arrival or departure. Fifteen built-in templates cover Bark Push, DingTalk, Feishu, WeWork, Telegram Bot, Discord, Slack, IFTTT, PushPlus, WxPusher, Ntfy, Gotify, ServerChan³, PushDeer, and Custom HTTP.

Steps:

  1. Open Today > Settings > Hook Automation and turn on Enable Hook Automation.
  2. Tap Add Channel, pick a template, then fill in the channel name and the parameters it asks for.
  3. Under Events choose arrival, departure, or both, and under Scope pick All Locations or specific ones. Use Time Windows, Minimum Dwell, and Minimum Interval to limit when it fires.
  4. Tap Send Test to confirm delivery, then check each request in Automation Logs.

Notes:

  • Requests are sent when the event is produced, so they inherit the same background delivery delay as visits.
  • Custom HTTP lets you edit the payload template and headers; the secret never leaves with an export.
  • Disable hooks when Low Power Mode is on is on by default, so requests wait until the battery recovers.

Performance & Battery

Why doesn't MeTrail consume battery like a navigation app?

The default Power Saving mode depends only on iOS visit events, and Balanced adds geofences around the places you already visit; neither keeps the GPS running all day. Precise samples your location while you are moving and uses noticeably more battery; it pauses in Low Power Mode or when the battery is low and resumes once the battery recovers.

Notes:

  • All three modes record stays rather than a continuous route, and all need Always location permission.
  • Leaving Background App Refresh off, or staying in Low Power Mode, slows down event delivery.

How do I save battery for a while without losing my trail?

The … menu on the Today bottom sheet separates two needs: lowering precision keeps the timeline complete, while pausing stops recording until you resume or the pause ends.

Steps:

  1. Open the Today tab and tap … in the bottom sheet header.
  2. Tap Switch to Power Saving to keep recording with the lowest-power signals, and Switch back to Balanced or Switch back to Precise when you want the shorter delay again.
  3. For a full stop, tap Pause for 30 minutes, Pause for 1 hour, Pause for 2 hours, Pause for 3 hours, or Pause Until Resumed; while paused, the same menu offers only Resume Tracking.

Notes:

  • Nothing is recorded while paused, and Today > Settings > General > Tracking shows a line saying tracking is paused.

Troubleshooting

How do I fix time conflicts, shifted locations, or wrong place names?

Fix single places first, then run batch repairs; that is usually the least work.

Steps:

  1. For one shifted location, open Location detail > More actions and use Adjust Location, Expand Matching Range, or Refresh Address.
  2. For visit time conflicts or a missing departure time, open Today > Settings > Maintenance Tools > Trajectory Repair.
  3. To batch merge near-duplicate records, tap Run Merge Now in Today > Settings > Maintenance Tools.
  4. If many place names need refreshing, use Today > Settings > Maintenance Tools > Refresh Saved Place Names.

Notes:

  • Reset Preferences only restores settings; it does not delete visit data.

Where should I check when sync looks wrong, search results are off, or the app keeps failing?

Start with sync switches and active filters; that explains most problems. Many "missing" results come from old filters still active, or data that has not finished syncing.

Steps:

  1. Open Today > Settings > iCloud Sync and confirm iCloud Sync or Sync Drive is still on.
  2. On the Places or Search tab, clear the keyword, city, and filters, then search again.
  3. Open Today > Settings > Logs to inspect recent errors and share the log file when needed.
  4. To reach the developer, use Today > Settings > Send Feedback or Today > Settings > Report a Problem.

Notes:

  • Archived visits do not appear in the main lists; check Visit Archives.
  • If it is only sync delay, reopening the app and waiting a while usually fixes it.