The questions that come up most often. If yours isn't here, write to me — the address is at the bottom, and it reaches a person.
Sprout has no cloud and no account, so it cannot pull your days down onto a new phone by itself. There are two ways they travel:
If you are about to erase the old phone, do the export first. It takes a minute and it is the one copy nothing can take away.
Because adding one would mean adding an account, a server, and a copy of your videos held by someone other than you. Sprout is built so that no such copy exists — it makes no network requests at all. The cost of that is real and it is yours to carry: delete the app and everything in it is gone, and nobody has a spare. Export what matters.
No. Deleting a day, deleting an album, and erasing everything are all immediate and permanent, and there is no copy anywhere else to restore from. Each one asks you to confirm first, which is the only safety net there is.
On the home screen, tap All next to Reel to open the timeline, then Export at the top.
Choose a range — everything, this month, or the last 30 days — and whether you want the date in the corner, opening and closing cards, and a cross-dissolve between days. Tap Make the reel, then either Save to Photos or Share to hand it straight to someone.
The result is an ordinary MP4 at 1080 × 1920 — nothing proprietary, playable anywhere. Longer films take longer to build; the progress bar is honest, and you can cancel part-way.
Yes. The play button on the home screen, and Play the reel at the top of the timeline, both play what you have so far. Nothing is rendered — you can do it as often as you like.
A hard cut between days has more rhythm, and the jump is the point. Turn the dissolve on in Settings → Export if you prefer it soft.
Every empty date carries a +, however far back it is. Tap it — in the seven-day row on the home screen, or on any empty square in the timeline calendar — and pick something from your photo library.
A photo goes straight in. A video gives you a filmstrip: drag it to choose which stretch to keep, then tap Keep it. The length of that stretch is whatever you've set as your longest clip.
There is no time limit. You can fill in a day from two years ago.
That's deliberate. If you fill in the day a baby was born, that day should be day one — not a negative number. The count adjusts to match.
Filled-in days count towards your total days, but not towards the streak. The streak only counts days you recorded on the day itself, so that it stays worth something. Nothing turns red, and nothing scolds you for a gap.
That is the system picker, not Sprout. Close the sheet and try again; if a particular item never loads, it is usually still downloading from iCloud Photos, and opening it once in the Photos app makes it available.
Just record again. The previous take isn't overwritten — it waits underneath as an alternate, and you can swap back to it with one tap. A few alternates are kept for the current day; the next day they clear themselves out and only the one you chose remains.
Between one and three seconds. Set your maximum under Settings → Capture → Longest clip. A tap on the shutter takes a photo instead; photos hold for a little over a second in the film.
While recording, tap the ✨ button for the panel: Off, Natural, Refined, Custom, plus five sliders — Smooth, Glow, Slim, Eyes, Sharpen. Anything you adjust is kept as your Custom preset. Slim and Eyes sit at zero in every preset; they only move if you move them.
To get rid of the panel altogether, turn Settings → Capture → Beauty off. The colour looks still work.
All of it runs on this phone's GPU, and the viewfinder shows exactly what gets recorded — there is no surprise afterwards.
Yes — turn off Settings → Capture → Record sound. Sprout then won't use the microphone at all.
Yes. Settings → New Seed starts another album — a baby, a plant, yourself, a pet, or anything else. Each one keeps its own film, its own reminder and its own day one. If you only ever make one, the album switcher never appears.
There are no folders, no tags and no search. This isn't a place to organise things.
Settings → tap the album → Daily reminder, and pick a time. It's scheduled on your phone, with no push service involved, and it skips any day you've already recorded.
iOS asks for notification permission the first time you open the app. If you turned it down then, no reminder can get through until you switch notifications back on in iOS Settings → Sprout.
Same page shows how much space your clips are using, under Storage used.
An iPhone running iOS 17 or later. Portrait only. There is no iPad version and no Mac version.
No. There is no subscription and there are no in-app purchases.
None. No analytics, no crash reports, no identifiers, no third-party code of any kind, and no network requests. The privacy policy spells out exactly what is stored and where — it's also available in Chinese.
Sprout is made by one person, so a reply can take a few days. Bug reports are read carefully: tell me your iPhone model, your iOS version, and what you did just before it went wrong.