Your Attention Ledger Survives the Reinstall
Last month, someone emailed us asking if they'd lose their entire attention history if they reinstalled iOS. They'd been tracking their media time in Intentr for six weeks, and the thought of losing that ledger terrified them. That message made me realise we'd built something people actually care about enough to worry about losing it.
Why we didn't make you log in
When we designed Intentr, we made a deliberate choice: you don't need an account. No email, no password reset flow, no 'forgot your username' friction. This runs counter to most app culture, where accounts are treated as the foundation of user retention. But our philosophy was different. We wanted the app itself to feel like something you own, not something you're renting from us.
The problem with that choice became obvious during testing. If you reinstall the app, or wipe your phone, or move to a new device, everything disappears. Your session history. Your time tracking. The pattern of what you actually consumed. All gone. For an app whose entire purpose is to help you understand your media habits over time, that felt like a betrayal of the core idea.
We couldn't ask you to create an account just to solve our technical problem. That would shift the goal from your attention to our data collection. So we had to think differently.
Local storage as a first-class citizen
Your attention ledger lives on your device first. Every session you complete, every minute you spend, every channel you follow, all of it gets written to your phone's local storage in a format that persists across app updates, and more importantly, survives a reinstall.
This isn't a backup system or a secondary feature. It's the primary storage mechanism. When you open Intentr, it reads from your device. When you finish a session, it writes to your device. The ledger doesn't depend on us keeping servers running or remembering you exist.
For Plus subscribers, we do offer cloud sync. That's optional, and it's encrypted. But the default experience, whether you're on Free or Plus, is that your data belongs to you on your device. A reinstall doesn't erase it because the ledger is part of the app's persistent storage layer, not tied to your session or account status.
The reinstall test we ran
Once we'd built this, we had to verify it actually worked. So we did what you'd expect: we installed Intentr, used it for a week, created sessions, consumed content across channels, and watched the ledger grow. Then we deleted the app and reinstalled it from scratch.
The ledger came back. All of it. Seven days of attention history, right there. We did it again. And again. Different devices. Different timings. Different amounts of data.
What surprised us most wasn't that it worked. It was how it felt to the person using it. You reinstall. You open the app. And instead of seeing a blank slate, you see continuity. Your habits are still there. The app remembers you even though you deleted it. There's something almost personal about that, which seems odd to say about a piece of software, but it's true.
What this means for your intentional media practice
Tracking your attention over time only works if the tracking survives the ordinary friction of life. Phone upgrades. Accidental uninstalls. OS updates. Storage resets. These things happen. If your ledger disappeared every time they did, you'd never develop a real picture of your media habits.
The ledger is meant to work like a physical journal. You don't lose six weeks of journal entries because you spilled coffee on the notebook and had to buy a new one. The entries existed. They belong to you. The container doesn't matter.
So whether you've been using Intentr for two weeks or two years, reinstalling the app doesn't reset your history. You pick up where you left off. You see the pattern of your attention across weeks and months, and that pattern is yours alone. It lives on your device. No login required. No account recovery. Just your data, persistent and yours.
It sounds like a small technical detail, but I think it reflects something bigger about how we built Intentr. We assume you care about your attention enough to want to understand it, and we design the app to respect that care. Does the idea of watching your own media habits without needing to hand over your identity feel different to you, or is it just what apps should have done from the start?
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