Foreglow/Lost entries
WHAT GOES WRONG
The app lost everything I wrote.
It is the complaint that ends the relationship. Not a bug report — a person describing years of their own writing that is simply not there any more.
Read from 4,311 one- and two-star reviews across 18 apps · 15 September 2026"Its still not allowing me to restore my data, does that mean I have to start all over again?"
1-star review, Android, 13 February 2021
We read every one- and two-star review we could retrieve for the manifestation, affirmation, journaling and vision-board apps people actually compare Foreglow against. Losing your own material is not a rare failure in this category. It shows up in three distinct shapes, and they have different causes.
across 9 of the 18 apps read
Counted by an automated scan for a data word within a short distance of a loss word, then read back. This measures how prominent the theme is in a sample of public reviews. It is not a rate, and it is not a claim about how often any app loses data.
Shape one: the new phone
The most common version has nothing to do with a crash. The app was working perfectly. Then the person bought a new phone, installed the app, signed in, and found an empty library.
"Love the pre-written affirmations, and the option to edit and write your own. Frustrated that when I get a new phone ALL of the recorded affirmations I've done are lost. Over 150. Ugh!! Especially when I've paid for premium!"
1-star review, iOS, 19 March 2019
"I cannot get support to reset my password. switched phones and can no longer get into my account. Unfortunately lost all my data."
1-star review, iOS, 24 November 2025
This pattern appeared in 14 low-star reviews across 8 apps. The cause is almost always the same: the app stored your material in a place the phone's own backup does not copy, or behind an account whose recovery path is broken. Paying for premium does not fix it, which is what makes these reviews so angry — several of them say so explicitly.
Shape two: the backup that was not a backup
The second shape is worse, because the person did the responsible thing. They found the backup setting, turned it on, and trusted it.
"Bought the lifetime version but it's not able to restore the purchase on top of it all the recordings that I did are gone too..that was one of the main reasons for getting the paid option 🙁"
1-star review, iOS, 18 February 2020
Backup and restore failures appeared in 27 low-star reviews across 6 apps. A backup that has never been restored is a hypothesis, not a safety net — and a restore path only gets tested on the worst day, by someone who has already lost the thing.
Shape three: your writing, behind a paywall
The third shape is a product decision rather than a defect. The entries exist. Getting them out costs money.
Reviews describing content locked away appeared across 8 apps. When the locked thing is a theme or an extra voice, people grumble. When the locked thing is their own writing or their own backup, they use words like hostage — and then they leave a one-star review and delete the app, taking the entries with them.
What should I check before trusting a new app?
Four questions, all answerable in about five minutes. Where does it put my writing — on this phone, or on a server? If this phone died right now and I restored a backup onto a new one, would my material come back? Can I get my material out as an ordinary file, without a subscription? And if I stop paying, what happens to what I already made?
An app that cannot answer the second and third questions plainly is the one that generates these reviews. Ask before you have two years of writing in it, not after.
Where does Foreglow keep what you make?
On your phone. Your notes, their audio, your recorded voice and your board images are written into the app's Documents and Application Support directories — the ordinary durable locations, not a cache. Nothing is marked to be skipped by the phone's backup. So when you restore an encrypted iPhone backup onto a new phone, your material comes back with it, the same way your photos do.
Any note can also be exported as an audio file through the normal iOS share sheet, so a copy can live somewhere we do not control. That export is not a paid feature.
What can Foreglow not do?
There is no cross-device cloud sync. Foreglow does not keep a copy of your notes on a server, which means we cannot hand them back to you if you lose your phone without a backup, and it means signing in on a second device will not bring your library across. The restore path is your phone's own encrypted backup, and nothing else.
That is a real limitation, not a feature in disguise. It is stated here rather than discovered later, because discovering it later is precisely the complaint on this page.
No app can promise you will never lose anything. A phone can be lost with no backup, and no design survives that. What an app can do is tell you where your material lives, avoid holding it hostage, and let you take a copy out whenever you want.
The wider evidence behind this page — the pricing patterns, the trial complaints, the whole corpus — is in our analysis of manifestation-app reviews. The per-app breakdowns are on the comparison pages, and what Foreglow keeps on your phone is set out in what stays on your phone.