• Automatic Exports — Settings › Backup & Restore now offers daily and weekly automatic exports of your timeline data to iCloud Drive, in GPX or JSON format. Files appear at iCloud Drive › Arc Timeline › Exports › Daily/Weekly. Exports run when your phone is connected to power.
• Place search expanded to match country, city, and street address fields, in addition to place name
• Visits without an assigned place now show their street address when available, instead of “Unknown Place”
• URL scheme arctimeline:// for launching the app from Shortcuts, automation, and other apps
Thanks Matt. It’s getting better almost by the day. I bit the bullet today and removed the old app: I was increasingly frustrated by its inability to track as accurately and easily as the new one.
I’m still keen for the merge places function you had on the old one.
Two other things I realised also aren’t yet present in the new app: widgets, and Swarm integration. (The Google Maps integration finds most locations, but very occasionally there is something in Swarm that’s not in Google.)
And, I couldn’t find in the forum, and can’t remember if you’ve previously said, is Arc Recorder necessary for Arc Timeline 4?
Maybe the export function can be more flexible, not only wait for the app export automaticly. In the old app, users can manually export any motion session to other apps, facilitating user sharing, and can also directly use gpx in other apps. Additionally, it is hoped to add manual monthly and annual exports functions.
Thank you for your hard work, i’m looking forward to your reply.
Lobbying for the export to image feature, not to be a pest, but so you have a pulse on the people, so to speak. I bit the bullet in the other direction and reverted back to the prior Arc only because correcting the timeline in two apps got tedious.
And a +1 to the request to be able to export any motion segment! Thank you for all your work!
Same feel here. The old app feels so old now. In principle it’s the same thing, but the data quality difference is sometimes stark, and it’s so slow!
Yep, coming. Ticket number is BIG-153, filed for hopefully the v1.2 update, high priority.
This is also filed. BIG-140 for the current item widget (so mostly the same thing as the old app’s, but I’ll try to do it a bit better this time). And BIG-23, which is for a speculative “mini timeline list” widget that I felt like I wanted at some point. I still like the idea. BIG-140 is filed as high priority, while 23 is low priority, because I’m the only one who’s expressed any interest yet
This one’s unfortunately not coming. Foursquare have kind of taken themselves out of the race. They raised their API pricing, while at the same time their database quality was in steady decline. They’re no longer competitive, and Arc has to be careful about costs - only a small, niche project, with limited resources.
Not strictly necessary, but it will make a comeback eventually.
Arc Timeline 4 records much more reliably, with far fewer terminations by iOS. Most of the time it can run happily for weeks uninterrupted. But iOS does reserve the right to terminate apps at any time for any reason, and it does have moods. So there’s always a risk of data gaps.
Arc Recorder will make a comeback, to again fill that role of protection from data gaps. But yeah for now it doesn’t act as fallback buddy for the new app, only the old. So for now it’s of no use. In a month or two though? It should be back on the scene. I’ll post about it on the forum then.
This feature is coming back! Ticket number is BIG-396, filed as high priority, and for one of the next feature releases.
These are unfortunately too big, so we can’t do them. It’s too much data exported in one file, so the app is likely to be terminated if we try, resulting in data gaps. Daily and weekly is as much as we can do for now. iPhones have their limits!
How do I get the latest version? I’m on 1.0(51) now and app update and Testflight do not offer a new version (also after refreshing). I’m in the Netherlands, maybe the new version is not made available for that region?
A strange thing. If you are on the Today page and you swipe down to see the large map and you swipe up again to hide the map it then still says ‘Today’ but shows the activity of yesterday. Maybe you can have a look into this. Loving the software and removed all the old versions stuff because of storage constraints in my iCloud storage
Arc Timeline 4 went general availability on the App Store on April 17, and all updates since (1.0.1, 1.0.2, and 1.1.0) have shipped there. We stopped pushing public TestFlight builds when v1.0 went live, so TestFlight will keep showing your old Build 51 forever — that’s the explanation for “no new version” there.
The App Store version is definitely available in the Netherlands — plenty of NL users have it installed already, so no regional issue.
For the App Store side: TestFlight and App Store are tracked separately, so the App Store won’t have shown an update for the TestFlight install. To switch over:
Open the App Store app (not TestFlight, not the iOS Settings updates list)
Search for Arc Timeline 4 by name
Tap GET (or Update if iOS recognises the existing install) — the App Store version replaces the TestFlight version in place, your data stays put. The switch is seamless — private beta team members regularly switch between TestFlight and App Store installs, no need to back up first.
Once the App Store version is running, you can remove the TestFlight version from the TestFlight app
For the Today/yesterday swipe quirk — thanks for the clear repro recipe. Worth checking once you’re on 1.1.0 to see if it still happens there. If it does, let us know and we’ll dig in — that’s a clean enough recipe to investigate properly.
The Lifetime IS still on file — the App Store install hasn’t picked up the entitlement yet. Cleanest recovery is to refresh through both apps:
Install the older Arc Timeline app from the App Store (the latest version has fixes that help the carryover handshake).
In Arc Timeline (older app): Settings → Subscription Settings → tap the Restore Purchases button.
In Arc Timeline 4: tap the circular-arrow icon to the left of the Continue button — that’s Restore Purchases on this side.
That sequence should re-link your Lifetime. Don’t pay anything in the meantime — the entitlement is on file, this is purely a state-sync issue.
If something doesn’t work along the way:
Old app says you have nothing to restore: still on the Subscription Settings page, tap the Get Help button — it’ll draft an email to Matt with the diagnostic info we need to investigate further.
Old app is fine but AT4 still asks to pay: that’s unexpected — tap the restore icon in AT4 again to be sure, and reply here if it’s still stuck. We’ll dig in.
Good news on the Lifetime recovery — glad that landed clean.
On deleting the old version: yes, safe to do. AT4 and the old Arc Timeline are independent apps with separate databases — AT4’s data is its own copy, populated during your migration. Deleting the old app won’t affect AT4’s data.
On the flash of yesterday’s activities during swipe-up: thanks for the clearer repro — Matt confirmed seeing the same on his 15 Pro just now. It’s a transition-rendering quirk (stale frame briefly visible during the sheet expand animation), iOS-version-dependent SwiftUI behaviour. We’ll see if we can improve it in an update.
Closing the loop on your lobbying, @Fly — daily timeline as image just shipped in v1.2.0. The most popular part of BIG-387 is now live; map-as-image is the second part, still queued for a later update.
Another quirk: when you are on the Yesterday page and you click Activities you get the activities for today. Tried this in the morning with no activity, you get a blank page. It looks like it that you always get today’s activities when you select that tab. It would be more intuitive to get the activities of the selected day
A follow up on this as I didn’t find this answer in the Forum: With the update I am now fully happy to move entirely to the new version. Is it therefore save when removing the old version of the app to also get rid of the ‘Arc App’ folder on iCloud, or does Arc Timeline 4 still need something out of that. It looks as if everything is handled by the new ‘Arc Timeline’ folder but I want to make sure that I don’t delete this and remove some of the necessary data that it requires to work with the full location history…
There’s actually a trade-off here that the linked-date-selection approach would lose. The current intentional behaviour is that each tab keeps its own independent date state — same as the old app.
A concrete example: imagine you’re looking at last Tuesday’s timeline, and then unrelatedly want to check your total cycling distance for the year. You’d switch to the Activity tab and change it to yearly view — but if the date selection were linked, that yearly switch would also pull Timeline to yearly, losing your view of last Tuesday.
The old app’s approach was “View in Activity” / “View in Timeline” menu options that explicitly carry the date across when you want it — rather than coupling the two tabs’ state by default. Filed as BIG-338 to add those menu options to AT4 in a future update.
Yes, safe to delete the old app, and also the files in the “Arc App” folder.
Your read is correct: the new app puts its backups and exports in “Arc Timeline” folder on iCloud Drive, and the old app used the “Arc App” folder. And the old app’s stuff isn’t needed anymore.
Personally I’d be still nervous about the delete, simply because deleting things makes me nervous But the new app doesn’t ever look in there, and has no need for anything in there.
But the new app doesn’t ever look in there, and has no need for anything in there.