Foreglow/Lost vision boards
WHAT GOES WRONG
The board you spent an evening on is gone.
A vision board is an hour of choosing images that mean something. The reviews that follow losing one do not read like bug reports. They read like betrayal.
Read from 4,311 one- and two-star reviews across 18 apps · 15 September 2026"More frustrating than enjoyable, it would constantly delete my vision boards everytime I went back to the home screen."
1-star review, Android, 9 February 2021
This failure is narrower than the pricing complaints but far more concentrated. It clusters in the apps that do nothing but boards, which is the opposite of what you would expect from a category's specialists.
The update that ate the board
The first pattern is the most destructive, because there is no user error available to blame. The board existed. An update shipped. The board did not survive it.
"Why did your update today (19/7/2024) delete my manifestations & vision board!! I'll have to delete your app now because I can't trust you in future to do updates & keep what I've created there. The one star is only pressed because I can't post without pressing a star."
1-star review, Android, 19 July 2024
Board loss of this kind appeared across 5 apps in our reading. The detail worth noticing is the second sentence: the person is not asking for the board back. They have already decided to leave, because what broke was not a feature but their reason to trust the next update.
Photos that vanish while you are still working
The second pattern happens during the build itself. You add an image and a different one disappears. You tap a picture and it is gone.
"Often when selecting an image, one of my previous images will be deleted. Also cannot work out to resize the font for any text."
1-star review, iOS, 11 January 2025
"It wasn't working properly. I'd click on an image and it would disappear. It's surreal to see so many different images and not 1 person of color."
1-star review, iOS, 6 December 2020
Photo loss during editing appeared in 10 low-star reviews, and freezes or crashes while adding images in 8 more across 4 apps. Both are small numbers against a corpus this size — and both land on the exact minute a person is most invested, which is why they produce one-star reviews rather than support tickets.
for one dedicated vision-board app in our sample
A majority-negative review base is a different signal from a large app with a long complaint tail. This is a sample of public App Store reviews across six storefronts, not a census, and a small review base moves easily.
Why do board apps lose boards more than other apps?
A board is not text. It is a layout that points at image files, and the two can be stored in different places with different lifetimes. If the layout is saved but the images were left in a cache the system is free to clear, or the images are kept but the arrangement is rebuilt on each launch, you get exactly these reviews — a board that is empty, partial, or quietly different from the one you made.
Editing makes it worse, because a board is edited in many small steps. An app that only writes to disk at the end of a session has a window in which everything you just did exists nowhere permanent.
What should I check before building a board in an app?
Build a small one first and then force-quit the app, rather than backing out of it politely. Reopen it. If what you made is still there, the app is writing as you go. Then check whether you can export the finished board as an image, and whether the board survives the phone being restarted.
Do that with five images before you do it with fifty. The reviews on this page are almost entirely from people who found out in the other order.
Where does Foreglow keep your board?
Board images are copied into the app's own Documents directory when you add them, in a dedicated folder alongside your notes and audio — not held as references to items elsewhere that can move or be cleared. Nothing there is marked to be skipped by the phone's backup, so a restore from an encrypted iPhone backup brings the board back with everything else.
The board and wallpaper editor is part of the free tier. Your board is not a paid feature, and it is not held behind a renewal.
If you want to start from a layout rather than a blank canvas, the vision board templates are free to use, and the wallpaper maker turns a board into a lock screen. The same durability question applied to written entries is in when a journal app loses your entries.