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.

What syncs

Tasks, notes, 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 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.

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.

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 locally. The note's status line on iPhone tells the truth in steps: Editing, Saving…, Saved on your phone, then Saved only once that exact note has been accepted by your account.
• 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

On Mac, a slim sync status sits under the toolbar at the top of the window. It says when changes are saving, shows Saved with the time once they have landed, offers Retry when something is stuck, and Review when the server refused a change. On iPhone a bar appears only when something needs you: offline, stuck with Retry, or refused with Review. A save that is merely taking a while never covers what you are reading: Saving… appears as muted text at the top of the screen, beside the screen's name, in the band your content always sits below. When all is well it shows nothing at all.

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 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. 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.

When two devices edit the same thing

For most fields, the later edit wins and nothing is lost that you would want back. Notes 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 stops rather than guess, keeps a persistent notice on that note, and offers Keep a copy: your words become a private note in Notes before the shared one reloads. Nothing you typed is thrown away.

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 for a TestFlight update.

Next: Capture, the one skill to learn first.