Cairn

Help & Support

Let's get your nudges back.

Cairn taps you on the shoulder when you're near somewhere you saved — screen off, app closed, nothing open. When that stops happening, it's almost never the app. It's one phone setting, and it's usually a thirty-second fix.

Cairn · now

You're near Rye Books

You saved this three weeks ago and, let's be honest, forgot.

Which phone?

Android

Most likely culprit 30 seconds

Power saving mode is doing its job a little too well

While it's on, Android stops letting Cairn notice you've moved. The alert doesn't get lost — it never gets made. Nothing arrives until you wake the screen yourself, by which point you've walked past the place.

  1. Open Settings → Battery, or Battery and device care → Battery.
  2. Turn Power saving off.
  3. If you have it scheduled to switch on at low battery, expect alerts to go quiet during those windows too.
If it worked, then stopped1 minute

Your phone put Cairn to sleep

Go a few days without opening an app and Samsung and friends quietly decide you've moved on, and stop it running in the background. Understandable. Still wrong, in this case.

  1. Open Settings → Battery → Background usage limits.
  2. Check Cairn isn't listed under Sleeping apps or Deep sleeping apps.
  3. Open Never sleeping apps → Add, and pick Cairn.
  4. Optional belt and braces: Settings → Apps → Cairn → Battery → Unrestricted.
Worth a check

The two permissions that actually matter

  • Notifications — Settings → Apps → Cairn → Notifications → allow. Obvious, but it's caught people out.
  • Physical activity — Settings → Apps → Cairn → Permissions → Physical activity → allow. This is how Cairn knows you're on the move without watching your location constantly. You can fix both from the Account tab inside Cairn.

iPhone

Most likely culprit 20 seconds

"While Using the App" means exactly that

Which is the one moment you don't need reminding you're standing outside the place. Cairn needs location set to Always so iOS can wake it when you arrive somewhere. It's the difference between a reminder and a diary.

  1. Open Settings → Cairn → Location.
  2. Choose Always.
  3. Leave Precise Location on — without it, iOS rounds your position enough to miss the place entirely.

You can also do this inside Cairn: Account → Background location.

Worth a check

Notifications, while you're in there

Settings → Cairn → Notifications → Allow Notifications.

Both phones

I drove past a place and got nothing

Fair. Cairn is tuned for walking pace and arrivals, and to save battery it only checks where you are every few minutes when the screen is off. At 40mph you can be past a place and gone between two checks. Arriving somewhere, or walking near it, is what it's good at. We're working on the drive-by case.

Both phones

I force-stopped it, and now nothing works

Force stop is the nuclear option — it cancels everything the app had scheduled, alerts included, until you open it again. Open Cairn once and it all comes back. Swiping it away from your recent apps is fine, though; that's not the same thing.

Both phones

I'd like my account and data gone

No hard feelings. Here's how to delete your account, or do it in the app under Account → Delete account. It takes your saved places, your profile and your shared links with it.

What "Always" actually lets us do

It isn't following you
Cairn hands your nearest saved places to the same geofencing service your phone already runs for Maps and Reminders, then goes to sleep. The phone does the watching. Cairn only hears about it when you cross into range of somewhere you chose to save.
It watches 20 places, not all of them
Only the ones nearest to you. Save five hundred places if you like — the list quietly re-centres on wherever you are.
It won't flatten your battery
Apps built this way — asleep until your phone notices you've moved — generally cost well under 1% of a day's battery. Cairn never sits running in between. It wakes, takes one location fix and shuts down: usually a few hundred milliseconds, and it gives up after six and a half seconds either way. It isn't sitting there with the GPS on.
The alert is worked out on your phone
Not on a server. We tested it on an iPhone with no SIM and no internet at all, and the nudge still arrived. Your location doesn't leave the device to make one.

Still nothing?

Email cairnailtd@gmail.com with your phone model and what you were doing when the alert didn't turn up. A real person reads it, and "it just doesn't work" is a perfectly acceptable opening line.