Sync, offline, and pending changes

Kept treats your devices as one account, not as two copies to reconcile. Everything you write lands on the device first, then travels to your account, then to your other device. Most of the time you will never notice the trip.

On iPhone, a sync recovery notice reserves its own space below the title bar so you can reach controls, including Sign out in Settings, while reviewing or retrying a change. If a connection drops after an item was already saved, retry confirms that same item in your account and clears the duplicate retry instead of leaving a stuck change.

What syncs

Tasks, notes (and the tables inside them), habits and their check-ins, goals, events you create in Kept, connected Google calendars, meals, workouts, focus sessions, your daily plan, and your account settings sync through your account. So do reminder times, though each device schedules its own alert.

A change made on one device reaches the other within seconds over a live connection: a note you write on your iPhone is in your Mac's Recents in about a second when the Mac is open and online. The connection can go quiet without saying so · a sleeping laptop, a network change, an iPhone that spent a while in the background, a sign-in that renewed itself. Kept does not wait to find out. On both iPhone and Mac it opens a fresh connection when the Mac wakes, when the network comes back, when your sign-in renews, and when the iPhone returns after more than a few seconds away, and fetches whatever changed while it was gone. If the connection still stops answering, Kept checks for new and changed notes every ten seconds until it is back. Bringing a Mac window to the front, or opening Kept on your iPhone, also catches your notes up within a second, so an open window is never showing you the morning while your other device has the afternoon.

Your account's own settings, such as your time zone, when your day starts, and your life areas, are the one exception to the live connection: each device picks them up when it opens or comes to the front.

A few things stay on the device they belong to, because they belong there. Apple Calendar events you did not create in Kept are read on that device and never copied into your account. Apple Health measurements are read on iPhone and only the resulting summaries travel. Layout choices on Mac, such as which Today cards are compact, stay on that Mac.

A large library on a new device

The first time you sign in on a device, or after a reinstall, Notes shows your 50 most recently edited notes as soon as they arrive, then fills in the rest behind them a few hundred at a time while you read, scroll, and open notes. Until every note has arrived, a count of your notes says Loading notes rather than the number so far, and a page card whose page has not arrived yet shows its placeholder instead of calling the page unavailable. A note that has not arrived yet is never treated as deleted: Kept removes a note from a device only after it has seen your whole library and the server confirms the note is gone. If the connection drops part way, Kept keeps what it has and picks up where it stopped the next time it refreshes.

After that first load, each device asks only for what changed. On Mac that includes the moments Kept refreshes on its own, such as after a capture or an assistant action, and every change arriving over the live connection: a Mac with thousands of notes no longer downloads all of them again for one edit, and a change it made itself costs no download at all.

Notes you open recently are kept on the device so they open at once, without waiting for the network, and still check for a newer version as they open. That copy is bounded: your most recently edited notes, every daily note, and anything not yet sent always stay on the device, plus about a hundred of the notes you opened most recently. A note you opened long ago and have not touched since opens from your account, so offline it may show its title and a preview until the connection returns. This only changes what the device keeps a copy of, never your notes themselves.

Opening your iPhone againiPhone

Kept opens Today, Tasks, Notes and your last destination from the copy already on your iPhone. Closing Kept, an app update, or iOS stopping it in the background does not make that copy wait for a connection. The workspace appears after its saved lists are ready, then checks for changes in the background.

If Kept last checked those saved lists more than fifteen minutes ago, a quiet Updating beside the screen title tells you it is checking for changes. You can keep reading and working. Unchanged items stay in place; changed items update, and items deleted on another device leave after Kept confirms the complete list. Changes still waiting to send keep their order and are protected from that deletion check.

The saved copy belongs to your signed-in account. A different account cannot open it, and sign-out or account deletion keeps its existing cleanup and recovery rules. A missing or unreadable local list is fetched again when a connection is available. On a new installation there is no saved workspace yet, so the first sign-in still needs to load your account.

Working offline

Capture, edit, and check things off as usual. Kept writes every change to a durable queue on the device and sends the queue when a connection returns. Repeated edits to the same item are folded so only the final version travels, and a change that was refused by the server comes back to you rather than quietly disappearing.

The words you type in a note get one more step of care. Saved on this device means the captured revision is in the device's durable recovery record. Queued means it has been handed to the account's send queue. Neither means another person has received it. A local recovery receipt covers that revision only; an earlier save cannot clear newer typing or work from another editor session. Shared notes retain their causal edits on iPhone and Mac independently of Tables. Their Offline · your edits are saved on this iPhone (or this Mac) status follows a durable local receipt. Kept resumes those edits after restarting without requiring you to reopen the note, and checks the server's receipts before replaying a batch whose response was lost. If local saving fails, keep the note open and try again; the status does not claim those edits are saved.

If today's saved note cannot be opened, writing already kept on this device stays separate. Try again reads the saved day before combining it with the draft. Kept does not treat a failed read as an empty day. A description or note title that cannot be accepted also stays available for review, including later edits after the first failure.

A recovered page can keep different typed and saved versions. Kept keeps the original page, its formatting and its saved base separate until you review them. When a newer copy is available after reopening, that copy stays on the page while you inspect the earlier writing. Choosing a version stays in Undo history. Undo returns the choice to review, including after you close and reopen Kept. Local recovery does not mean a change has synced. See Review earlier writing.

A shared draft is not sent blindly after a restart. Kept checks current access before showing it. Your draft or Your full draft lets you inspect and copy retained words; Copy full draft includes earlier chosen writing and original unplaced words. Loading the latest version does not discard unresolved drafts. A later conflict does not replace an older unresolved draft. Where Keep a copy is offered, it creates a private note titled Unplaced edits; creating that private copy still needs a connection.

If a note disappears while your last edit is being saved on this device, Kept keeps those words locally for Keep a copy. It does not send that edit to the missing note or recreate it during recovery. The retained words survive reopening Kept and still count as unsynced until you recover or discard them. You can find them in Notes, even when the original note is gone. Mac Today also offers the recovery entry; on iPhone, the daily sheet and inline Today writing area offer Keep a copy after the note disappears. Keep a copy puts the retained words in one new private note. If they came from a daily page that disappeared, that day stays absent. Further typing in the open daily page and closing it keep the words on this device for Keep a copy. A new day's first words still start its daily page. Discard asks before removing the kept words from this device. The Mac sign-out question names these kept words and directs you back to Notes or Today; waiting for sync does not send them to the missing note.

The title, tags, and folder of a note, and notes filed by widgets, Siri and Shortcuts, the assistant, or an import, use the ordinary queue path rather than the native editor's recovery choices.

A checkbox you write in a private note while offline still becomes a task. Kept checks which of your notes are shared before it makes one, and remembers the answer on each device. On a device that has never had that answer, such as a new install opened offline, the checkbox keeps its words and becomes a task as soon as Kept reaches your account, without you editing the note again.

While you are offline:

• Today still builds a plan from what the device already knows: due dates, reminders, goal links, priorities, and your own words. It grows when the cloud plan arrives.
• Notes autosave. Each open note carries one small status line in its header, on iPhone and Mac: nothing while you type, _Saving…_ if a change is slow to leave, _Offline_ when the device has no connection, _Not synced_ when a change could not be sent, and _Synced_ once a change you made there has left the device with nothing waiting or refused (on Mac, a note that is in sync shows nothing at all). Offline, click or tap the line to read _Offline · not synced_ when the note has changes that have not gone yet. See Save status. Widgets, Siri and Shortcuts intents, the assistant, and imported notes are offline-limited: they hand words to Kept to file, but that filing itself needs a connection, so treat them as best-effort until you see the words land in Notes. Kept's AI features play no part in whether or when your words are saved.
• Capture files a line as best it can on the device. Cloud routing catches up later and can refine the kind and fields, never the words you typed.
• Widgets keep showing their last snapshot and say when it is stale.

Reading the sync notice

Sync trouble shows in three calm places, and never floats over a note, a page title, or the Back and action buttons. A small clay dot marks your avatar when you are offline, when a change is stuck, or when your account refused a change; on Mac also when Kept could not refresh. An ordinary save never draws the dot. The iPhone drawer and the Mac sidebar carry the matching row: Retry when something is stuck, Review changes when a change was refused. Review changes opens the review sheet, where each refused change has Try again and Discard, and stays listed until it reaches your account or you discard it. On iPhone the same line also appears just above the page, in its own space so the page starts below it; at the largest text sizes it wraps rather than cutting off. On Mac, when the sidebar is hidden or only shown over the window, that row sits under the toolbar instead, so it is never out of sight. An open note on Mac keeps its own save status in its header. A save that is merely taking a while shows _Saving…_ as muted text beside the iPhone screen name, and nothing at all when all is well. VoiceOver reads the same status on the avatar.

_Saving…_ only counts changes that are actually on their way. Work waiting for Kept's own server update, a refused change, and a deleted task still inside its Undo are not counted as saving, so the line never stays up with nothing to send.

A brief outage is not a refusal. Offline, timed-out, and rate-limited writes stay in the queue and retry on their own. The same is true while your sign-in renews, for example just after a Mac wakes: Kept never reads or writes your account without your own sign-in, so a change waits in the queue and a list keeps what it last showed instead of coming back empty. The same goes for a change that reaches your account a moment before the thing it belongs to, such as a first action sent just ahead of its new goal: Kept retries it quietly for about a minute and a half, and only calls it refused if the goal never arrives. If an earlier version of Kept already parked one of these in the review sheet, the next launch sends it once more. On iPhone and Mac, Discard is visible beside each change in the review sheet. After Try again, the change stays in the list, marked Trying again…, until your account confirms it saved; it leaves the list only then (or when you discard it), and if the server refuses it again it stays with the new reason. The sheet closes on its own once nothing is left to review. The iPhone recovery notice has its own space above the page, so the first row and editor controls remain reachable. Notes always send one at a time, so one note the server refuses never holds back the others written beside it (the two notes from first-run setup included). When a new note's first send reached your account but its answer was lost, the next send finds that saved note and brings it up to date instead of calling it refused, but only while nothing else has changed that note since; if it was edited elsewhere in the meantime, Kept keeps the newer words on your account and leaves the change in the review sheet for you to decide.

A refused write is rarer and means the server would not accept the change as written. Kept parks it and shows it in the review sheet with two honest choices: Try again sends the same change again, Discard lets it go. Waiting does not move a refused write; only you do.

If another device edited the same record first, Kept refreshes the record and tells you so: _This changed on another device. Kept refreshed it._ A note whose words this device has not finished sending is not replaced by the server's copy when you open it; the device keeps your words. On iPhone and Mac, an earlier save arriving while newer words wait to send also keeps those newer words available when you reopen the note, including after restarting Kept.

When two devices edit the same thing

For most fields, the later edit wins. Notes you have shared are treated more carefully: Kept merges your later edit into the newer version when it can. When it cannot be sure, because a paragraph you were rewriting was deleted elsewhere while you typed, it keeps your unplaced words for review. Keep a copy, where offered, files the full retained snapshot in a private note titled Unplaced edits. Your full draft lets you inspect and copy retained text before deciding what to reapply. Loading the latest shared-link version keeps its unresolved drafts beside it. A failed save is not reported as delivered.

When a shared-link edit reaches the note and replaces newer words in the same paragraph, the recipient sees Your edit was saved and replaced newer words. The owner sees Replaced by a collaborator, with the displaced words when they can be recovered, and Restore when restoring that paragraph is safe. Restore saves a new change and leaves unrelated writing in place. This candidate needs the matching server update; see Review words replaced by a collaborator for availability and limits. Kept does not combine the two versions or keep a complete server history of every earlier note version. Loading the current note does not discard retained recovery drafts.

A private note you have not shared does not get that merge, with one exception: a note that holds a table with properties is saved edit by edit, like a shared one, and that note does not become shared. Otherwise, until a future update, two concurrent edits to the same private note settle last-writer-wins, so an edit made on one device while the other was offline can be replaced once the two reconnect.

Tables. In a table, two devices changing different cells keep both edits. Two changes to the same cell never settle silently: the first value to reach your account stays, and the other waits under Review changes, with Use this device, Use saved value, and Copy value. Those drafts survive relaunch, and Use saved value keeps what you set aside. A row or property someone deleted stays deleted, and only Copy value is offered. Pending table edits send when Kept opens, before you open the note. A table from a newer Kept says Update Kept to edit this table. These controls apply to test accounts with typed tables; public 1.9.8 builds use plain grids. See Tables.

Force a refresh

You rarely need to. Kept refreshes and flushes its queue every time it comes to the foreground. If a device seems behind, leave the app and come back, or press Retry in the sync status. If the notice keeps returning, restart the app, then check the App Store for an update.

Live sync waits for a current session for your account; a refused connection closes and Kept reconnects after sign-in or when your sign-in renews. Periodic update checks skip refreshes without a current session for your account, and unchanged notes keep your list in place. Slow update checks finish before another starts, so a slow connection can still catch Notes up. A shared note that is already connected keeps your presence in place when your sign-in renews.

Next: Capture, the one skill to learn first.

When shared-note privacy protection first becomes active for a note, Kept refreshes its shared copy before catching up with more edits. Retrying an older edit keeps its original identity. The owner retains private source details separately from the shared writing. See Shared note privacy.

Turning shared-note privacy protection on or off refreshes already-connected copies at a newer saved version. Kept does not change the shared copy underneath an unchanged version. Edits that cannot preserve retained owner details stay unsaved.