Support
HuntFix Journal for iPhone
Hunting for a bit of help?
Shoot me an email — [email protected] — and I will get back to you as soon as I can. HuntFix Journal is made by one person with a day job and a hunting habit, so give it a couple of days before you decide the message went astray.
If it is about your data or your privacy specifically, [email protected] lands in the same place and keeps those messages in their own pile.
Not every hunt goes to plan
If you find a bug, ping me an email when you next get some coverage. I would far rather hear about it than not: I cannot fix what nobody tells me about, and a record-keeping app earns its trust by being told when it got something wrong.
Leave me a trail I can follow
The more sign there is, the quicker I can work out what happened:
- What you were doing, what happened, and what you expected instead.
- Your iPhone model and iOS version — Settings → General → About.
- The HuntFix Journal version, at the bottom of Settings → About.
- A screenshot, if there was something on screen worth seeing.
Things people ask
Is it on the App Store yet? Yes, since 1 October 2026: HuntFix Journal on the App Store. It is free to download and free for your first 7 days, then NZ$11.99 a year. It needs an iPhone on iOS 27 or later.
How long does logging actually take? That is the requirement the whole app is built around. Two taps to start an outing, or one press of the Action button. Two to four taps to log a harvest: species, count if it is not one, sex if the species has one, Save — position, time, daylight and moon are already filled in. One tap to finish. A blank day is two taps and under ten seconds.
Why does it keep asking me to log days when I got nothing? Because a blank day is the most useful record in the book, and nearly every hunting app throws it away. A rate is a count over the hours you put in. If you only log the good days, the hours are wrong, every figure is inflated, and the app is flattering you instead of telling you anything. Quick blank exists to make the honest thing the cheap thing.
Why won't it tell me where the best spot is? Because it does not know, and neither does anybody else with eleven outings behind them. What it can do honestly is show you the arithmetic: two deer in twelve hours over five outings at one spot, one in fourteen hours at another, with all three numbers side by side. That is a fact about your record. "Best" would be a claim about the country, and the record cannot support one. The judgement stays yours, which is where it was always going to end up anyway.
What does "too few to compare" mean? That fewer than three outings sit behind the figure, so the app has greyed it out. Three is not a magic number, it is just the point below which a cell is obviously noise. The figure is still there and you can still read it — the app is telling you what it is worth, not hiding it.
Insights are empty. There is nothing in the record yet. What fills up as soon as you log something; When and Where need hours and outings behind them before they say anything much, which is the honest behaviour rather than a fault. If Insights is showing a lock instead, the free week or the subscription has ended — see What does the subscription actually buy? below.
Why are "seen" and "taken" always in separate columns? Because they are different facts and adding them together would ruin both. A sighting says animals were about. A harvest says you connected. Eleven deer seen on a blank day is a very different day from a blank day with none, and the app is built so you can tell those two apart forever. Sightings are never counted in the bag, anywhere.
The weather shows a dash. There was no signal when the outing started or finished, so no weather was fetched, so none is shown. The app will not go and guess one afterwards from a nearby day. Everything else about the outing — the light phase, sunrise, the moon — is worked out on the phone from the time and the place and needs no signal at all.
My species is not in the list. Add it. Name, module, done — three taps, in the field, and it is a first-class species from then on. The New Zealand list that ships is a starting point, not a boundary. Australia, the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom have their own vocabulary — stag and hind or buck and doe, harvest or shot — and their species lists are still to come; until they do, add what you shoot or catch and tell me what it was.
What is the difference between an area and a spot? An area is the property or the block — Snowdon Station. A spot is a place inside it — Willy's Gully. A spot is a named circle with a centre and a radius, so when you save an entry inside one the app offers to file it there and you confirm with one tap. Insights roll up at both levels, so you can compare two gullies or two stations.
Does it record whether I released the fish? No, and that is on purpose. Kept or released, who took it, the antler detail, the plumage, the weapon — none of it is in the app. It is a record of what the party took, not a trophy sheet, and every field the form does not have is a field you do not have to tap past at four in the morning.
Where are the tides? Not in the app, and not in the schema either. It was left out on purpose on 12 September 2026: it needs a port table, a data source and a caveat about which of the two the app used. If enough anglers ask, it can be added later without disturbing anything.
Where are the seasons and bag limits? Deliberately nowhere. The app records what you did; it never says what you may do. Seasons, limits, licences and permits differ by region, change without notice, and an app that is wrong about one is worse than an app that never mentioned them. There is one optional free-text note per entry if you want to write your own licence number down. Knowing the rules where you are is yours.
The Ask tab says the on-device model is not available. That is your iPhone or your Apple Intelligence setting, not the app. The tab says which of the three reasons it is — the phone cannot run it, Apple Intelligence is switched off, or the model is still downloading — and it still offers you Claude, which comes with the subscription, and the option of copying your record out and pasting it into whatever you like.
How does the Claude option work, and what does it cost me? Pick Claude at the top of the Ask tab. There is no key to find, no account to create and nothing extra to pay: it comes with the app, in the free week and with the subscription, and I pay Anthropic for it. Your question goes through a small relay of mine — which checks the subscription or the free week, counts your questions and keeps nothing else — to Anthropic and back.
You get five Claude questions a week: five in any seven days with the subscription, and five in the free week. The Ask tab shows how many are left after each answer, and when you have used them, the day the next one frees up. Apple's on-device model has no limit.
What is sent is the fact sheet: your totals, your rates with the hours and outings behind them, your companion totals, your last ten outings, and your spot and area names. There is a second switch that sends the full log — every outing, one line each. Coordinates and photographs are never sent, with either switch. The whole of it is set out on the privacy page.
Can the AI just tell me where to go? No, and both models are instructed and then checked so that they do not. They can report your figures with the hours behind them, compare two of them, tell you what you have never tried, and ask you a question about a coincidence they noticed. They cannot say "best", they cannot say "you should", they cannot predict, and they cannot use a number that is not in your record. The app checks every answer against that list before it shows it to you, and if the answer breaks one of the rules you see what it did wrong underneath.
An answer had a warning under it. Is it broken? It means the app read the answer, found something in it that it is not supposed to say, and would rather tell you than quietly pass it on. Treat that answer with suspicion. If you can, send me the question — an answer that gets through with a finding is exactly the sort of thing I want to see.
Is there a backup? Yes, and it is on unless you turn it off. The record is mirrored to your own iCloud — the Apple Account already signed in on your phone — so losing or replacing a phone does not lose your seasons. It is your iCloud, not a service of mine, and I have no way to read any of it. Settings shows whether it is really mirroring, and says why if it is not.
Turning it on or off takes effect the next time the app opens, and the screen says so. There is no "last backed up" time, because iOS does not give the app a real one and I would rather show a dash than invent something plausible.
Do I still need to export a backup file? It is worth it. iCloud covers the phone going in a river. It does not cover deleting something — a deletion syncs too. Settings → Export writes every outing, entry, spot, companion and photograph into one file you can put anywhere, including somewhere that is not Apple's. Do it at the end of a season.
Can I get my record out into a spreadsheet? Yes. CSV gives you one row per entry, plus a row for every outing that produced nothing, with the conditions flattened — so the blank days are still in the denominator when you start summing things. GPX gives you your spots and entries as waypoints for any mapping app. JSON is the complete backup. None of the three is ever locked, whatever you have or have not paid for.
What does the subscription actually buy? The app. HuntFix Journal is free for your first 7 days, then NZ$11.99 a year. With the free week or the subscription you can start outings, add entries, use the Map, all of Insights and Ask. Reading the record you have kept, exporting it and the iCloud backup never need it.
How does the free week work? It starts the day you first open the app — not when you subscribe — and nothing is asked of you for seven days: no subscription, no sign-up, nothing to cancel. The Log tab says the date it ends. After that, heading out again needs the subscription, which is paid from the day it starts; there is no free trial on the subscription itself. Deleting and reinstalling the app does not start another free week on the same phone.
What happens if I stop paying? An outing that is already running is never cut off — you keep logging and you finish it as normal. After that the app becomes a reader until you subscribe again: every outing, entry and photograph stays exactly where it is and stays fully readable, export keeps working in all three formats, and the iCloud backup keeps running. Starting a new outing, adding entries, the Map, Insights and Ask wait for the subscription, and come back with your whole record already in them. Nothing is ever hidden, degraded or deleted.
Cancelling, restoring, refunds. Cancel in iOS Settings → your name → Subscriptions. Restore Purchases is on the subscription screen for a new phone or a reinstall — make sure you are signed in to the Apple Account you subscribed with. Refunds are Apple's, at reportaproblem.apple.com. If something about the app made you want one, I would genuinely like to hear it too.
Can I start an outing without unlocking the phone? That is what the Control is for. Put Head out on your Lock Screen or in Control Centre, or map it to the Action button, and it is one press with gloves on in the dark. Siri and Shortcuts can start an outing, log an entry, finish, or file a quick blank, and they go through exactly the same code as the buttons do, so the conditions and position are captured identically.
Will it come to Apple Watch, or Android? Watch is the feature I most want and it is a whole second app to build and test, so it waits until the phone version has done a season. Android? Nope — I am an iPhone guy.
Does it talk to HuntFix? Not yet. The plan is one-way and modest: a recovered animal in HuntFix gets a Log this harvest button that hands the species, the time and the photograph across, and you confirm the entry here. It gets built after both apps have shipped, and it is not needed for either one to be useful on its own.
Will you add …? Possibly. Tides, weather backfill for outings logged out of signal, and the Apple Watch app are the three already on the list. Ideas from people who actually hunt and fish carry the most weight, so tell me what you would use.
If the app will not open
Your record is stored separately from the app's code and usually survives an update. Try restarting the phone before anything else.
If you do end up deleting and reinstalling, your record comes back from the iCloud backup as long as it was switched on and the phone is signed in to the same Apple Account. If you had turned it off, it does not — so export a backup file first.
Reporting a privacy or security concern
Email [email protected]. There is no account, the iCloud backup goes to your own Apple Account, which I cannot read, and the Claude relay keeps nothing but the times you asked — so the surface for this is small, but if you have found something I want to know about it and I will say plainly what I have done.
HuntFix Journal shows you your own record and the arithmetic behind it. It does not predict, it does not recommend, and it does not know the law where you hunt. Those are yours.