Questions

It is an app for saving the places you want to go (SAVE), recording the meals you have had (LOG) and sharing them with your friends (SHARE). There is no place in it from which you broadcast to the general public. Your records reach only the friends you and they have both approved.

No. The only connection is a mutual friendship. You send a request, and you become friends only once the other person approves it. One-directional following does not exist in cRawl. You can unfriend someone at any time, and they are not notified.

No. The public lists, the followers-only visibility and the discovery surface aimed at the general public that used to exist have all been abolished. A list is either Private or Open (your friends can see it too) — those two, and nothing else.

There are two ways. One is an invitation link — when someone opens a link you have issued, the two of you become mutual friends there and then. The other is the QR code or link to your profile — that opens your profile, from which they send a friend request, and you become friends once you approve it. Both start from “Add a friend” on the ＋ button. There is no limit on the number of friends you can have.

No. Your logs and lists reach only the friends you and they have both approved. There is no surface on which a search turns up someone else’s records, no mechanism that puts you in anyone’s recommendations, and no screen for growing a follower count. The one exception is an entry to a BOARD topic, which appears anonymously as far as other users are concerned (see below).

Google Maps places and saved lists, posts on Instagram / X / TikTok, Tabelog, and Apple Maps. Just choose cRawl from the share menu of the app you are in. With Instagram you can share a restaurant’s profile page as well as a post, and we will use the account name as the clue for finding the place. On top of that, you can take a screenshot or a photo of a magazine page and we will pick out the name of the place with on-device text recognition and offer it as a candidate.

Importing works by matching the name and the geographical clues read out of the post or the screen against map search results. Where many restaurants share a name, or where the post never mentions a location, a mismatch can happen. When there are several candidates a selection screen appears, so you can pick the right one. If a place has already been added, delete it from the list and search for it by hand instead.

On a free account, five times a month across Instagram / X / TikTok combined (reset each calendar month). With Premium it is unlimited. Imports from Google Maps, Apple Maps and Tabelog, and imports from an image, do not count towards that number.

No. When you import from social media we send only the URL of the post you shared to the analysis server, which extracts candidate restaurant names from publicly available information and returns them. Nothing about your account, your login or your connections is ever sent. See our Privacy Policy for details.

At the restaurant, you just take photos. Photos taken with the cRawl camera are grouped automatically by the time and the place they were taken, so that one meal becomes one log. You choose the name of the place afterwards, which means you never have to look it up and type it in while you are there. To the group of photos you can then add your impressions and a rating across five items.

You can. Press “Write a log” on the ＋ button and a screen opens already showing your most recent photos (“All photos” opens the full library). A draft is built from the date, time and position of the photos you choose, and you then choose the place — which is to say, the place is decided afterwards. If you have no photos, “Continue without a photo” lets you write one by hand.

No. The old mechanism that required you to be within a certain distance of the place before you could record anything (a check-in) has been abolished. Take a photo and that photo becomes a log. Location is used to group photos together and to offer candidates for the name of the place.

The automatic grouping uses “within about two hours of the previous photo” and “within about 100 m of the centre of the photos’ positions” as its guides. Photos taken after a gap, or somewhere further away, become a separate log. You can fix this on the log screen — there are three things you can do: change the name of the place, choose photos and split them into a separate log, and merge two adjacent logs.

Indoors and underground the accuracy of your position drops, and nearby places may not be picked up. When nothing appears, choose the place from search instead (the place you choose is added to your list). Please also check that “Precise Location” is turned on for this app in your iOS settings.

No. The rating (the pentagon: value, comfort, taste, would-return, access) is always yours alone. Even for a log you have made public, what reaches your friends is the photos, the place, the text and so on — the values of the rating are not included. It is not there for comparing scores with anyone, so you can be as honest as you like.

If 30 minutes pass after you took photos without your having chosen a place, we remind you once, for at least one such log. The notification is withdrawn the moment you decide the place (and several such logs are collected into a single notification). Inside the app, a log with no place waits in LOGS marked “place not set”.

Two.
・Private: only the owner and the co-editors can see it.
・Open: in addition to the above, the owner’s friends can see it.
You can switch at any time. Even an Open list is invisible to anyone who is not a friend.

It appears in your LISTS as a copy, and whatever the owner changes is reflected in it as it is. If you saved it, you cannot edit it. If the owner sets it back to Private, or the friendship comes to an end, the saved list quietly disappears from your side (leaving no trace and no notification).

You can. Co-editors can see and edit the contents even of a Private list. You can only invite friends. If someone who is not yet your friend opens an invitation link or QR code, they are taken to the friend request screen first.

The moment the log is finished, it flows straight to your friends’ timelines. There is no post button. It reaches your friends and no one else. If you choose private while making it, it does not flow anywhere.

You do. When a friend publishes a log we tell you that “X has posted a log”, and opening it takes you straight to the timeline. Notifications from the same friend are grouped to at most one every 30 minutes, so however many they publish on a single outing you are not bombarded. There is at present no setting for silencing friends’ posts on their own; if you want to stop notifications altogether, turn them off under “Settings > Notifications > cRawl” on your iPhone.

Please switch that log to private. It withdraws from the timeline, and the photos that had been published are deleted from our servers as well. The log itself stays with you.
If you make it public again, it appears at the top of the timeline as a new post (the reactions and replies it had received until then are not carried over). Note also that we cannot undo anything other users saved or screenshotted while it was public.

There is no such thing. We did away with the very idea of deleting a “post” separately from the log. When you want something gone from your own side, delete the log; when you only do not want other people to see it, choose private. Deleting a log removes it from your friends’ timelines too.

The timeline is ordered by when things flowed into it (a log made public again rises to the top). The date and time you actually went to the place is shown separately in the detail of the post.

From the share action on a log, cRawl composes a single image and exports it.
・A single log: five designs (white ground with one photo / white ground with four photos / white ground with vertical text / full-bleed with vertical text / full-bleed with a white band). The format is either story (9:16) or post (4:5).
・Several logs at once: either the map design (the places you went gathered onto a single map as numbered pins — the default) or the classic design.
・Besides those, there is a memory video in which the photos flow past (story 9:16 / post 4:5), and a statistics card that puts your dining statistics on a single sheet (from the statistics screen — Premium).
The exported image is simply handed to the app you choose; nothing is ever posted outside cRawl automatically.

It is not. An entry is anonymous as far as other users are concerned, and what reaches them is the name of the place, your comment and your photos. Neither your name nor your icon is included, and neither are the coordinates or the address of the place. However, in order to prevent duplicate entries, to confirm eligibility and to deal with abuse, we retain the correspondence between an entry and the person who made it (this record is not disclosed to other users). Entries are a separate flow from the timeline, so you can enter whether or not your logs are public.

From the menu at the top right of a post or a list you can choose “Report”, “Hide” or “Block”. We review the contents of reports and, where we judge it necessary, take measures such as deletion or making the content private. For anything urgent, please write to us directly at sparkmates.dev@gmail.com.

Verification badges are granted by us, and we are not currently accepting applications. We may grant or withdraw one at our discretion at any time.

Using your logs and nothing else as its material, it shows you the shape of your eating out: your streak and your pace, days of the week and times of day, the range you move in, new places against returns, the people you ate with (who you eat with most, the proportion of meals alone, the regular haunts of a pair), the leanings of your taste (the breakdown by genre), the places you are letting rest (places you saved but have not managed to visit) and the breakdown of your lists. The aggregation is closed within your own records: it never compares your statistics with anyone else’s, and it never ranks anyone. Statistics are a Premium feature.

They cannot. The statistics are a screen for you alone. Their names appear because you are looking back at the records in which you yourself tagged them as companions on a log; the results of the aggregation never reach them. Only if you export a statistics card and share it yourself can anyone else see what is on that image.

You can. Put the “Quick actions” widget on your Home Screen and you are one tap away from taking a photo, the timeline, or writing a log. The small size holds one of the three, which you choose; the wide size holds all three side by side. A small mark appears on the timeline slot while there are friends’ posts you have not seen yet.

You can. Put the Lock Screen widget (“cRawl cam”) in place and one tap starts the cRawl camera. On iOS 18 and later you can put the same thing on the button at the bottom of the Lock Screen and in Control Centre. If you press it while signed out, you are taken to the camera once you have signed in.

For three purposes: to show nearby places on the map, to group the photos you take into a single meal, and to offer candidates for the name of the place. It does not mean that your position is being recorded and transmitted continuously.

Only when you turn on “Nearby place notifications”. This uses the iOS region monitoring (geofencing) mechanism, in which the OS tells the app whether you have entered a registered point, even while the app is closed. It does not mean that your position is tracked and recorded at all times. If you do not need that notification, “While Using the App” is quite enough for the map and for recording logs.

There is a power-saving mode in the settings. Turning it on reduces how often the position is updated and how often the map is redrawn. There is also a setting that follows the iOS Low Power Mode and holds back automatically.

In three places. The first is the app’s own area on your device (a place only you can see). The second, while the setting is on, is the cRawl album in the iPhone Photos app. The third is your own iCloud, a copy kept so that your photos come back when you change phones or reinstall the app.
On top of that, only the photos of logs you have made public are uploaded to our servers (Firebase Cloud Storage), where they become visible to your friends. Photos of private logs never go up to our servers.

We cannot. The photos are placed in a private area inside your own iCloud account (the CloudKit private database). We can neither open it nor take anything out of it, and it is not disclosed to other users.
This copy is on from the start. To stop it, turn it off under “Settings > Photo backup” in the app. Once it is off, photos from then on are no longer sent to iCloud (photos already saved are not deleted).
The space used is your own iCloud storage. When you are not signed in to iCloud, or there is not enough space free, this copy is not made and the photos stay on your device.

Deleting in the app removes the photo the app holds and the copy saved to iCloud (which means it disappears from your other devices on the same account too). A copy saved to the Photos app with the setting on remains. If you want that gone as well, delete it from the cRawl album in the Photos app.

No. At the point at which a photo is exported for publication, all of the metadata embedded in it, location included, is removed.

Broadly, the following: how many lists you can add to the map, how many lists you can create yourself, how many imports from social media you may make, how many places you can see in a match list, the dining statistics, clips, CSV export of your logs, and showing the VISITED list on the map. The core — saving places, recording logs and sharing them with friends — is all free (making a list Open is free as well, and the number of places one list can hold is the same on free and on Premium). For the current list, please see the comparison table in the app (its contents may be updated).

That is the co-editing reward. Create a list, make a friend who arrived through your invitation link a co-editor of it, put three places into it between you, and add one log each, and both of you — the one who invited and the one invited — receive three months of Premium. Downloading alone, or signing up alone, does not earn it (and the person who invites can receive it at most four times a year). You can check your progress on the invitation screen in the app.

Because this is an auto-renewing App Store subscription, please cancel under “Settings > Apple ID > Subscriptions” on your iPhone, or from subscription management in the App Store. We cannot carry out the cancellation on your behalf. Refunds likewise follow Apple’s policy.

You can do this from “My page > Settings > Delete account” in the app. Deleting it removes your profile on our servers, the lists you created, the logs you had made public and their photos, your comments, and your friendships. The copies of your photos saved to iCloud are deleted along with them. Logs and photos left on your device disappear when you delete the app (copies saved to the Photos app remain).

There are not. We show no advertisements and we do not use the advertising identifier (IDFA). We do collect statistics on how the app is used (which screens are used, and so on) in order to improve it, but these include neither free-text input nor location coordinates.

They do not. Extracting the name of a place, inferring its genre, fuzzy search and translating comments are all processed on the device alone, on devices that support it. A translated sentence is used only for the display in front of you: it is neither saved nor transmitted. On devices that do not support it, these features either do not appear or work in the older way.

We register your own lists and places, and nothing else, in the search index on your device. No other user’s data ever enters that index. The index is erased when you sign out or delete your account.

iPhone only, portrait only. Some features that run on the device (extraction and translation using Apple Intelligence, for instance) are available only on the OS versions and devices that support them.

This screen appears only once support for that version has ended. When we change how data is held or the conventions of communication, running an old version as it is would mean parts of it quietly breaking with no error at all, so we stop instead, in a form that makes it clear why nothing is working. Update to the latest version from the App Store and you can carry on exactly where you left off, with not one record lost. If this screen still appears after you have updated, please let us know at sparkmates.dev@gmail.com (you can also write from the contact button on the screen itself).

As a Premium feature, you can export your logs as CSV (from the settings). Your photos, if the setting is on, are also saved in the cRawl album of the iPhone Photos app, from which you can take them directly.