Support
Sonar is built by one person. Email is the only support channel, and it reaches me directly.
If you need to talk to someone now: Helplines and crisis resources →
Usually answered within a few days. If it’s urgent in the way a helpline is urgent, please use one of those instead: they answer immediately and I might not.
Reporting something broken
Useful to include: your iPhone model, your iOS version, the app version from the bottom of Settings, and what you were doing when it happened.
Please don’t send screenshots of your own history, your notes or your reasons. I don’t need them to fix a bug, and this app’s whole arrangement is that I never see them.
Questions that come up
- Does Sonar block gambling sites or apps?
No, and it never will. It is a companion and a record, not an enforcement tool. Blocking is a different job done better by schemes built for it. The resources page lists GAMSTOP for Great Britain and the equivalents elsewhere.
- Do I need an account?
No. There is no sign-up, no email, no password and no profile. You open the app and answer a few questions, and that is the whole setup.
- Where is my data kept?
In the app’s private storage on your phone, and nowhere else. There is no server holding it, so there is nothing to breach and nothing for me to look at.
- What happens if I get a new phone?
Your history does not move with you yet, and that is the honest answer rather than a comfortable one. There is no backup or export in this version, so a new phone starts from day one. An encrypted export file is the next thing being built.
- How do I delete everything?
Settings → Delete everything. It removes every check-in, every slip, your reasons and your settings from the phone immediately. There is no backup, so it cannot be undone. Deleting the app does the same thing.
- What does Sonar cost?
Nothing. There is no charge, no trial to run out, and nothing to enter a card for. Every part of the app is open.
That may change later, and if it does I will say so here before it does rather than after. What will not change is the urge screen and the helplines: those stay free whatever happens to the rest, and they are not a feature.
- Is there an Android version?
Not yet. iPhone first, and properly, before anything else.
- How do I turn the anonymous statistics off?
They are on, and there is no switch for them in the app at the moment, and that is a deliberate choice I am not going to dress up. Deleting the app stops them for good. Settings → Delete everything discards the random identifier along with your data, so nothing sent afterwards can be joined to anything sent before. If you would rather they stopped and you would rather not delete anything, write to me and I will act on it. The privacy policy lists exactly what they contain.
- Why is the forecast telling me nothing useful?
For the first week or so it has little to work with beyond your payday and how recently you bet, and it says so out loud. It holds every personal-pattern signal back until there are enough check-ins to mean something, because a pattern drawn from three days would be a guess dressed up as a finding.