OwnDay FAQ

OwnDay is a private, on-device timeline of your day. It can record visits to places, add movement and compatible Apple Health activity, let you correct or add entries, and show summaries in Timeline and Insights.

OwnDay needs iOS 26 or later. Ask OwnDay and the “Help fill this gap” suggestion also need an iPhone that supports Apple Intelligence, with it turned on; everything else works without it. Some iPhones don't provide Motion Activity data, and OwnDay still records places and reads Apple Health on those.

No. There is no OwnDay account, sign-in or subscription service. Everything OwnDay records is kept in the app on your iPhone.

OwnDay hasn't learned your places yet, so early on you'll see more unnamed places and wrong guesses. Each time you name or correct a place, OwnDay remembers it, and the timeline needs less from you. For its first three days Timeline shows a short note saying so; tap Got it to dismiss it.

Yes. Add Visit in Timeline works without Location, Motion or Apple Health access. You can enter a place, activity, note and time yourself, and you don't need to create places first.

Yes. Settings → Getting Started covers set-up, what OwnDay can and can't know, and how your data is kept. This FAQ is also in Settings, under Help & About.

No. iOS decides when background visit updates arrive, and those updates can be delayed or incomplete. OwnDay is designed to recognise stays and broad movement, not to create a perfect second-by-second record of your route or explain why you visited somewhere. Review or add anything that is missing or wrong.

Location is needed for automatic visits. To record while OwnDay is closed, allow Location when iPhone asks, then open Settings → Location & Motion in OwnDay, turn on Background location logging, and choose Always. Motion Activity is optional and can add walking, running, cycling and vehicle movement. Apple Health is optional and can add compatible workouts and sleep. Manual entries work without any of them.

Location is allowed, but Background location logging is off, so OwnDay only records while it is open on screen. Open Settings → Location & Motion and turn it on. If iPhone asks, choose Always.

Background location logging is on in OwnDay, but iPhone is only allowing Location While Using the app, so automatic visits can't be recorded while OwnDay is closed. Tap Open iPhone Settings on the Location & Motion screen and choose Always under Location.

iOS shows a permission prompt only once. After you decline, the choice has to be changed in iPhone Settings rather than in OwnDay. Open the matching screen in OwnDay's Settings (Location & Motion for Location or Motion, Apple Health for Health) and tap Open iPhone Settings or Open Apple Health. For Location, the setting is under Privacy & Security → Location Services → OwnDay. If Apple Health lists categories as “Not yet asked for”, Connect Apple Health can still request those.

No. Background recording uses iOS visit and significant-location monitoring, which is intended to be lower power than continuous GPS tracking. The optional Track walking routes setting keeps only a rough handful of points for future walks; it is not a smooth route trace and does not create a new named place.

iPhone is giving OwnDay only an approximate location. OwnDay can still record visits, but matching them to a Saved Place and recognising travel can be less accurate. To change it, tap Open iPhone Settings and turn on Precise Location.

Common causes are Location being off, While Using access instead of Always, background logging being off, reduced accuracy, iOS delivering the update late, or the phone not having enough evidence to recognise a stay. A short stop, such as a quick errand, is the easiest to miss. A missing record isn't proof nothing happened: use Add Visit for the missing time, and if it keeps happening, tell us the approximate time and your Location setting.

Location updates can be approximate or delayed, and several places can sit close together. Open the visit to correct it. Once a place is confirmed it can become a Saved Place, so later visits there are easier to recognise.

Yes, if you turn on Track driving stops in Settings → Location & Motion. It notices a short stop OwnDay would otherwise miss, such as a drive-through, and adds it to Review for you to confirm or dismiss. It is never added or named automatically, and it only works for drives after you turn it on.

When an automatic visit runs well past how long you usually spend at that place, OwnDay can send one notification to check. A place needs a few settled visits before this applies. To stop these, turn off Notify when a stay runs long in Settings → Location & Motion.

Movement comes from Motion Activity, which is optional and which iPhone keeps for only about a week. It can also arrive late or be unavailable on some devices. When you're at a place, the visit takes priority, so moving around inside it doesn't normally create a separate card. A workout from Apple Health still appears.

Background recording relies on low-power iOS location monitoring rather than continuous GPS. Battery use still depends on your iPhone, iOS version, settings and other apps. If OwnDay seems to be using a lot of battery or the phone gets hot, please let us know your iPhone model, iOS version, OwnDay version and roughly when it happened, rather than changing settings back and forth.

Depending on what you allow, OwnDay can read sleep, workouts, walking and running, and some movement and health trend data, and add them to your timeline and Insights. OwnDay only reads from Apple Health; it never writes or changes anything there.

An Apple Watch can take a while to sync last night's sleep to your iPhone, and the Health app can show it before OwnDay is able to read it. Wait a little, then refresh. If you add sleep manually while it's still syncing, you may end up with a duplicate when the Watch's data arrives; OwnDay warns you about this.

OwnDay reads a defined set of Health data, not all of it. A category may also be turned off for OwnDay, delayed, or not recorded on your devices. An empty value means OwnDay received nothing usable for it, not that the Health app has no data. To check what OwnDay can read, open Health → Sharing → Apps → OwnDay.

Open Settings → Apple Health and tap Re-import Health history. OwnDay rereads the last 30 days and updates existing entries without duplicating them.

Yes. Settings → Apple Health → Add sleep manually adds a sleep entry. OwnDay never guesses sleep from your phone sitting still.

A named area with a location and size that OwnDay uses to recognise places you return to. It can also have a default activity, such as “At home”. Manage them in Settings → People, Places & Activities → Saved Places.

Mark one Saved Place as Home and another as Work. Settings shows a Finish setting up prompt until both are set. OwnDay only calls a trip a commute when it's between the places you've marked; it doesn't guess from a place's name.

No. In Settings → Work Hours, choose the days and hours you work. Any stop you make then is marked as a work stop and gathered into one Work route on your Timeline, however long it lasts. Each stop keeps the name or address OwnDay found for it, and none of them waits in Review. Tap the Work route to see each stop, and change any one if it wasn't work.

Use On the job now in Settings → Work Hours, or the Start Work and End Work shortcuts from Shortcuts or Siri. Starting counts stops from now until midnight as work, even outside your usual hours. Ending takes the rest of today off. At midnight your schedule applies again. Stops from before you switched it on are not changed.

Open that day's Work route on the Timeline, expand it and tap Not a work day. That removes the work-stop label OwnDay added from every stop that day. Places keep their names, and stops you marked as work yourself are kept. To fix just one stop, open it and choose Not work — remove from Work route. Either one can be put back from the stop's screen with Mark as a work stop again. If you know in advance that you're off, turn off On the job now in Settings → Work Hours and today's stops won't be marked.

No. Work Hours only looks at when a stop began. It does not create Saved Places, set a default activity for an address, or teach OwnDay that a place is for work, so a café you stop at once on shift won't be labelled work next time. Saved Places such as Home or your depot are never marked, and any activity you choose on a stop replaces the automatic label. If a customer is a regular, you can save their address as a Saved Place yourself.

OwnDay learns from your corrections. A confirmed place can update a Saved Place, and correcting the same place or activity repeatedly shapes what OwnDay suggests next time. You can still change any individual visit.

Yes. Settings → People, Places & Activities has Activity Labels for names and icons, and Groups for how activities are grouped in Insights.

Yes. You can tag people “With” on a visit. They come from a short list you build up yourself in OwnDay, not from your Contacts, and stay on your iPhone. A name is a record about someone else, so add one only where you're comfortable keeping it.

Time OwnDay has no suitable record for. It's a prompt to review or add context, not a claim that you did nothing. Very short gaps, which often happen while iOS delivers a location update late, still count toward coverage but stay out of the review list unless you turn on Show short gaps.

A combined row that adds up every group outside the top five. Open it to see which groups it includes and each activity's own group.

Insights compares the selected period with the records available for it. A short history, missing permissions, Health data that hasn't arrived yet, or a lot of unlogged time can make a comparison unavailable or less meaningful. Add or correct records, and refresh once delayed Health data comes in.

Tap the Apple Intelligence button at the top of Insights and ask a plain-language question about your history, such as how long you spent somewhere. It runs entirely on your iPhone with Apple's on-device model and answers only from your own records; nothing is sent to Apple or to us. It needs an iPhone that supports Apple Intelligence, with it turned on. Insights works the same without it.

Yes. You can ask Siri things like “How long was I at [place] in OwnDay”, add a note to your current visit, or change your last visit's activity. The same actions are in the Shortcuts app. To pick places and activities by name in Spotlight, Siri and Shortcuts, turn on Settings → Spotlight.

Optionally. Turn on Settings → Calendar and OwnDay uses your calendar as extra context for gaps, for example when an appointment overlaps a stretch with no recorded location. A calendar event is never treated as proof something happened, and OwnDay never writes to your calendar.

Yes. Tap the share button beside “How you spent your time” (or “Breakdown” for a single day) in Insights to export the period as CSV or JSON. Each row includes exact check-in and check-out times with the time zone. An export can include places and notes, so share it with care. For a full copy of your archive, make a backup instead (see below).

Yes. Settings → Display & Region sets distance units (Automatic, Metric or Imperial) and appearance (System, Light or Dark). Distance units change only how things are displayed. Dates, times, the first day of the week and language follow your iPhone's Language & Region settings.

Your timeline and imported activity are stored on your iPhone and protected by the device's data protection. OwnDay has no account, OwnDay server, analytics, advertising, third-party tracking SDK, or automatic cloud sync.

OwnDay does not automatically upload your timeline, coordinates, notes, backups, or raw Health data. When it needs to identify an unfamiliar public place, it can send a nearby coordinate to Apple Maps and stores the returned suggestions on your iPhone; a place name you search for is sent to Apple Maps the same way. If you turn on Visit Weather (off by default), an approximate location, rounded to roughly 5 km, is sent to Apple Weather to fetch the weather. Health and Motion access is read-only; OwnDay never writes to Apple Health. See the Privacy Policy for the full detail.

Not at the moment; OwnDay has no sync of its own. To move to a new iPhone, make a backup and restore it there. iPhone's own iCloud Backup can include OwnDay's data along with your other apps, under Apple's terms.

Yes. Turn on Settings → App Lock. OwnDay then asks for the Face ID, Touch ID or passcode you use to unlock your iPhone whenever you return to it; it doesn't create a separate PIN. Recording carries on in the background while the app is locked, and your places and activities are removed from Spotlight.

Deleting OwnDay removes its data from your iPhone, and there is no server copy. It doesn't remove a backup or export you already saved elsewhere, or an iPhone backup made before you deleted it; delete those separately if you want them gone.

Open Settings → Data & Recovery → Create backup, then use the share sheet to save the file somewhere private and trusted. A backup is a readable file that can contain your location history, place names and notes, so share it only with people and services you trust.

Your timeline, Saved Places, people you've tagged, corrections, diagnostics, location history, activity definitions and portable preferences. It's a snapshot of that moment and doesn't update afterwards. It is checked for accidental damage but isn't encrypted or password-protected.

No. Restore replaces the archive on the current iPhone with the backup's records and portable preferences. OwnDay checks the file before applying it, and rejects unsupported or incomplete backups without changing your archive. Make a current backup first if you want to keep what is there now.

On the old iPhone, make a backup and save it somewhere you can reach from the new one, such as Files. Install OwnDay on the new iPhone, then use Settings → Data & Recovery → Restore backup. You'll still need to allow Location, Motion and Apple Health on the new iPhone; permissions aren't part of a backup.

Erase archive removes your visits, places, people, corrections, diagnostics and location history from this iPhone. Activity definitions, preferences and permissions stay. It can't be undone, so make and save a backup first.

No. There's no OwnDay server, so there is no copy we could restore from. Keep your own backups. If a restore, erase or repair looks wrong, stop and get in touch before trying it again.

Use Settings → Send Feedback. It attaches a redacted support report, and you can describe what you expected, what happened, roughly when, and whether it keeps happening. A broad time like “after breakfast” is more useful than an address or route.

By default it contains only the app version, your device and iOS type, and aggregate counts and timings. It never includes coordinates, place names, notes or Health values. A more detailed report is available in Diagnostics, but only if you turn it on yourself.

Not unless we ask and explain why. A backup contains your full history. Before sending a screenshot, check it for addresses, place names, notes, dates and Health values.

Stop repeating anything that changes data, such as importing, restoring, erasing or repairing. Keep the app installed, note roughly when it happened, and get in touch. If OwnDay still opens, make a backup before trying anything else. Please don't delete the app or install an older version without asking first.