FAQ

Two things, both converted into steps. Every minute you spend in a moving vehicle becomes a debt in steps, and every step you take is a credit against it. The beam tips toward whichever side is heavier. Win the day by walking off what you rode, and win the week by winning more of it than you lose.

One ride minute costs a fixed number of steps, set by Difficulty in Settings: 50 on Easy, 100 on Standard, 150 on Hardcore. Twenty minutes in a car on Standard is a debt of 2,000 steps, so 2,000 steps is what it takes to get back to level.

Changing the level applies from today. Earlier days keep the level they were played at, because rewriting last Tuesday would make your history a function of a switch.

The pans hold whole weights in four sizes: 1, 5, 10 and 50. One weight is 1,000 steps on the steps side and 10 ride minutes on the rides side, and a pan holds at most eight of them, six on the Apple Watch.

So a pan is a rounded picture of an exact number. Eighteen ride minutes is shown as two 1s, which spell out as 20, and Tipscale says so when you open the breakdown rather than letting the sheet look as though it cannot add up. The numbers above and below the scale are always the exact ones.

A stretch of time iOS reports as automotive. Tipscale reads those stretches, joins any that are separated by only a short stop, and books each one as a ride with a start time and a length.

A short ride is one under 5 minutes, which you can change to anywhere between 3 and 10 in Settings. It is only used for the weekly report's short-ride insight: Tipscale has no location, so a short ride is one that did not take long, not one that did not go far. Short rides still cost you their minutes.

Tipscale reads history rather than watching live. iOS keeps about a week of movement history, worked out from your phone's own sensors, and Tipscale asks it what has happened. That is why a ride usually appears a few minutes after it ends, and why the app can tell you about a journey you have already finished.

It is good and it is not perfect:

• A very short trip can be missed. A two-minute hop may never look like a journey.
• A bus or a tram usually reads as a car, because to a phone it is one.
• A train often reads as nothing at all, because a smooth carriage barely moves the sensors.
• A phone left at home is a ride that never happened, and a phone left in a car someone else drives is a ride you did not take.
• Without Motion & Fitness there is no detection at all. If Today says nothing is being weighed, that is why: turn it on in iOS Settings, Privacy & Security, Motion & Fitness, Tipscale. Your steps keep being counted either way, and the hours Tipscale could not watch are marked not measured rather than counted as a loss.

There is no way to correct a ride by hand in this version, and that is deliberate: a number you can edit is a number that means nothing.

From Apple Health if you allow it, which is how your Apple Watch steps get counted, and from your iPhone's own pedometer if you do not. Settings says which source is in use, and whether Watch steps are actually arriving rather than only that a Watch is paired.

The app works either way. Health access is the difference between counting the steps you took with your phone in your pocket and counting all of them.

That Tipscale did not have motion data for the whole of it, so it cannot honestly say what happened. Its ride minutes are a floor rather than a total.

A day like that is not a loss. It has no verdict, it is drawn open rather than filled, it is left out of the week's score, and a streak walks straight over it as if it were not there. The day you installed the app is usually one, and so is any day you switched Motion off.

The streak counts days won in a row. A day is won when your steps outweigh your ride debt, or when you had no rides at all and walked at least 3,000 steps. Today never breaks it, because the day is not over: a run that reached yesterday is alive until midnight. And a day Tipscale could not fully watch is skipped, neither extending the run nor ending it.

A day with no rides yet is not decided, so the beam is held level and the screen says "steps so far". With nothing to outweigh, a beam thrown hard over on the first step would be claiming a win against an opponent who never turned up. It is released to its real tilt once the day is genuinely car-free at 3,000 steps.

On the morning after your week ends, as a notification if you have allowed them and as a card at the top of the Week tab either way. It covers the week's score, the days you won, your time on foot against your time in vehicles, and one or two things it noticed.

Every earlier week is kept in the archive under the same tab. Tapping a finished week in Trends opens its report too.

At most three a day, and nothing between 21:30 and 08:00. There are four kinds you can turn off one at a time: Ride ended, the Evening check, the Weekly report and Achievements. News & updates is separate and does not count against the three.

Three things hold notifications back, and none of them is a fault:

• A Driving Focus is on during exactly the thing Tipscale measures. "Ride ended" is sent as Time Sensitive, which a Focus lets through once you allow it: iOS Settings, Focus, Driving, then allow Time Sensitive notifications for Tipscale.
• A Scheduled Summary holds everything but the Time Sensitive kinds until your summary time. Tipscale says so in its own Notifications screen when it detects one.
• The three-a-day limit. A quiet kind gives up its place to Ride ended rather than pushing it out.

Everything is unlocked for seven days, with no payment and nothing to cancel. After that Today keeps working in full: your rides and steps keep being counted, your history keeps growing, and your widgets and watch keep their last reading.

The Week tab, Trends, the badges, notifications, the widgets, the watch app and the app icons need Tipscale Pro, which is monthly, annual or a single lifetime payment.

Nothing you recorded is lost or held back. Unlock Pro whenever you like and it is all there.

Because a widget draws whatever the app last wrote, and iOS decides how often a widget may be redrawn. Past 15 minutes old, Tipscale stamps the reading with its time rather than presenting a stale number as the current one. Opening the app brings everything up to date at once.

It shows the same scale for today, your steps, and the rides you have taken, and it counts the steps it sees on your wrist. Complications put the day on your watch face.

It reads from your iPhone and from Health on the watch, and it sends nothing anywhere. The floor it is tested against is a Series 6.

Your movement, never: no account, no location, no third parties, and nothing about your steps or your rides. Once a day Tipscale makes one anonymous check-in carrying nine things, and the whole of it, field by field, is on the Privacy screen in Settings.

Settings, FAQ, Contact, inside the app. It attaches your app version and your iOS version so you do not have to look them up, and nothing else. There is a form on the support page on the web too, if you would rather write from a keyboard.

Tell me what happened and what you expected. One person reads it, and a real answer takes a day or two.