Support — Plain and Simple Tools
The app is a shelf of small tools. Each one does a single job, and each one is separate — a problem with one is not a problem with the app.
Getting started
Open the app and look at the shelf. Every tool says what it does, what it will ask you for, and whether it sends anything anywhere, before you tap it. Pin the ones you use to the tab bar — up to three of them.
The shelf includes Charge, Negatives, Steps to HA, Sort and Wake Light. If none of them is a job you have, this one has nothing for you yet — the shelf is honest about being short.
Charge
Plug the phone in and leave it for a few minutes. Charge works by timing how long the battery takes to gain a step of charge, so it needs a little while before it can tell you anything. It shows that it is still measuring rather than inventing a number.
Why it will not show a figure straight away. iOS does not tell an app how many watts a charger is delivering — there is no way to ask. Any app that shows you an instant wattage is making it up. Timing the fill is the only honest method available, and it gets within about a fifth. The app explains this on the screen.
Why the figure moves. Charging is not linear: phones take power fastest when the battery is low and deliberately slow down as they fill, and they slow down again when warm. A charger measured at 20% and at 80% will not give the same answer, and neither reading is wrong.
Negatives
Use a lightbox, or any even backlight. The conversion reads the film's own clear edge to work out what the base color is, so it needs to see that edge and it needs the light behind the frame to be even. A window works; a lamp pointed at the film does not.
Hold still while it focuses. The app waits for focus to settle before it captures, so a shot that never fires usually means it has not found focus — move slightly further away and try again.
You can import instead. If you have already photographed your negatives, pick them from your library rather than re-shooting them.
Where the results go. Straight into your photo library. The app uses the add-only permission, so it puts pictures in and cannot see anything already there — which also means it cannot gather its results into an album for you.
Steps to HA
Pairing. On the integration's setup screen in Home Assistant, add a person and it shows you a QR code. Tap Scan code from Home Assistant and point the phone at it. If you would rather not use the camera, the same link is printed under the code — choose Paste the link instead and enter it by hand.
It will not send until you have added a name. The Send my steps now button stays grayed out until the Your name field has something in it. The name is only a label for your chart and can be anything; scanning the QR code fills it in for you.
https:// addresses only, unless the server is on your home network. The app refuses a plain http:// address anywhere outside your own network, and says so rather than sending. The webhook ID is the only thing protecting your Home Assistant, and in plain text anyone on the path can read it. Home addresses — homeassistant.local, 192.168.x.x, 10.x.x.x — still work over http, because that traffic never leaves the house.
A private address only works at home. If you paired with one, the tool says so on the screen. Your phone sends from wherever it happens to be, so steps stop arriving the moment you leave — which is a fair choice, as long as it is a choice.
Nothing sends on a day with no steps. Rather than send a zero and overwrite a real number on your server, it sends nothing and tells you why.
Background sending is a few times a day, not a schedule. iOS decides when it happens — it wakes the app when new step samples arrive, at most hourly, and throttles further on battery and on how much you use the app. A quiet day may not send at all. Send my steps now always works immediately.
The camera will not turn on
Two tools use the camera, for unrelated reasons: Negatives, to look at a film negative, and Steps to HA, to read the pairing code. Open Settings, find this app in the list, and switch Camera on.
Steps to HA does not need it — choose Paste the link instead and type the address by hand.
If saving fails instead, it is the photos permission rather than the camera — same place in Settings, the row that allows adding photos.
What reaches the internet
One tool sends, and only to an address you gave it. Steps to HA posts your step count to your own Home Assistant. Nothing else in the app can reach the network at all — not Charge, not Negatives, not the Lock Screen tile — and that is checked rather than promised: a test fails the build if code capable of loading a URL appears anywhere outside the Steps to HA folder, and a second test fails the build if a web address is written into the app anywhere except the single file holding the App Store links behind Rate and Share. Those are handed to iOS to open and are never fetched — a third test fails the build if that file gains anything capable of fetching.
So there is no address in this app that you did not supply. If Steps to HA cannot reach your Home Assistant, the usual causes are a private address while you are away from home, or an http:// address the app is refusing — both covered above.
Something else
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