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On this page
- Starting a walk — Enter DTD vs Create Route
- Location permission — and why Allow Once fails halfway
- How a door is counted — 14 m, 20 s, 75 s
- Battery, pocket and screen off
- Apple Watch
- Your data — where it lives, who sees it
- Importing a list
- When it gets something wrong
- Getting a walk back
- Reporting a bug
Starting a walk
What is the difference between Enter DTD and Create Route?
Enter DTD is for walking. Create Route is for planning. They are the two buttons at the top of the menu (tap ☰), one above the other, and they are the only two ways to begin.
| Enter DTD | Create Route | |
|---|---|---|
| Use it when | you are standing on a street and about to knock | you already have a list of addresses and want an order to visit them in |
| Needs a list first? | No. None at all. | Yes — the houses have to exist before they can be ordered |
| What it records | your walk: every door you stopped at, found automatically | a planned sequence of stops you mark off as you go |
| How it ends | you tap stop; the walk is saved to History | you finish the stops |
DTD is door-to-door. If you are new, start with Enter DTD — it needs nothing from you but a street.
I tapped Enter DTD and nothing is counting
That is correct, and it is deliberate. Enter is not start. The screen opens with the map and your leads visible and nothing running, so you can look at the street before you commit. Tap Start on that screen when you actually begin walking.
Is there a guided version?
Yes — ⚡ Quick start, at the top of the same menu. Three steps. It stays prominent until you have knocked your first thousand doors, then shrinks to a quiet line. It never disappears.
Location permission
Which permission do I grant?
“Allow While Using App”, and then turn on Precise Location. Anything less and the app cannot do the one thing it is for.
REFarm asks for When In Use only. It never asks for Always, because it does not need to know where you are when you are not on a walk.
Why does Allow Once fail partway through a walk?
Because Allow Once is not a permission, it is a loan. iOS takes it back the moment the app stops being the thing on screen — you put the phone in your pocket, take a call, or the screen locks — and from that instant no new position arrives.
What that looks like from the doorstep: the timer keeps counting, the screen still looks like a working walk, and no further doors are ever detected. You knock the rest of the street and come back to a walk that stopped recording at house four.
Grant While Using App once and it holds for every walk. Fix it in Settings → Privacy & Security → Location Services → REFarm → While Using the App, and switch Precise Location on.
What if I refuse it by accident?
The walk screen shows a banner telling you location is off. Earlier builds did not — the walk simply recorded nothing and said nothing. If you ever see a walk with 0.0 km and no doors, location permission is the first thing to check.
Why is there a blue bar / blue arrow at the top of my phone?
Because a walk is running and REFarm is reading your position with the screen off. That is iOS telling you the truth, and it is exactly what you want to see during a walk. If you see it when you are not walking, a walk was never stopped — open the app and stop it.
How a door is counted
What counts as a door?
Standing still within 14 metres for 20 seconds or more. That is the whole rule. You do not tap anything to log a knock — you walk up, you knock, you stand there, and the door is recorded.
| What happened | What the app records |
|---|---|
| you stayed inside a 14 m circle for 20 s or more | a knock |
| you stayed for 75 s or more | a knock and a conversation |
| you walked past, or paused briefly | nothing |
The 75-second threshold is why the summary can tell you “31 doors, 4 conversations” without you having pressed anything. Nobody stands on a doorstep for a minute and a quarter unless somebody answered.
Why 14 metres and not the exact house?
Because 14 m is roughly the honest accuracy of a phone GPS beside a house with walls and trees around it, and a tighter circle would miss real doors rather than catch them. It is a detector for you stopped here, not a survey instrument.
Do I have to pre-load the houses for this to work?
No — and this is the difference between REFarm and the canvassing apps built for sales teams. Those detect a visit by drawing a circle around a lead you already entered. REFarm has no target list to match against: it reads your own GPS trail and finds where you stood. Any door, any street, nothing loaded in advance.
Battery, pocket and screen off
Does it work with the screen off, or in my pocket?
Yes. A running walk keeps recording with the screen locked and the phone in a pocket or a bag. Doors are detected the same way. That is what the blue location indicator at the top of the screen is telling you.
Can I use another app while walking?
Yes. Take a call, check a message, open Maps — the walk keeps running underneath. On iPhone 14 Pro and later the walk also appears in the Dynamic Island, so your door count is visible without opening the app.
What does it do to my battery?
An honest answer: it has not been measured, so no number is published here. What can be stated is what the app asks the phone to do — continuous location at the highest accuracy setting, with a new reading roughly every 4 metres of movement, for as long as the walk is running. That is a real draw, comparable to a running or cycling tracker, and it is heavier than a navigation app that only wakes at turns.
Practical advice until it is measured: on a full-morning walk, carry a battery pack, and stop the walk when you finish the street. A walk left running in the car afterwards costs battery and adds nothing.
Does it need a data connection?
GPS itself does not. Looking up addresses when you import a list does, and so does the map filling in tiles for a street you have never opened. Walking and door detection keep working on a street with no signal.
Apple Watch
Does it work on Apple Watch?
Yes — REFarm ships a real watch app, not a notification mirror. It needs watchOS 10 or later. There is nothing to buy and nothing extra to install beyond the iPhone app.
What is the watch actually for?
Two things, both of which exist so you never take the phone out on a doorstep:
- The next house. The moment you step away from one door, the wrist names the house you are walking toward — not when you arrive, which would be too late to read.
- The outcome. When a door becomes a conversation, the watch asks. Two big buttons — Good or Done — and then the specific outcome on the second screen. Two taps, at chest height, without breaking eye contact for long.
I answered on the watch and the phone did not update
It will. Wrist answers are queued and delivered even when the phone is asleep in a pocket, so an answer can arrive minutes later and still land on the right door. An outcome that only worked when the phone happened to be awake would be an outcome that gets lost, which is worse than none.
Do I have to answer every door?
No. An unanswered door stays an ordinary knock. The outcome question is only asked where there was a conversation.
Your data
Where does my data live? Does anyone else see it?
On your iPhone. Nobody else sees it — there is nowhere for it to go. Your walks, your addresses, owner names, phone numbers and notes are stored on the device. REFarm has no account, no login, and no server that holds your list.
You do not have to take that on trust. Settings → Privacy & Security → App Privacy Report on your iPhone lists every domain the app has contacted. The Privacy Policy states exactly what leaves the phone and what does not.
Does REFarm record audio at my doors?
No. REFarm cannot record audio at all. The app ships without the microphone permission — not switched off, absent — so there is no setting anywhere that turns it on. A tool that records strangers' doorsteps across provinces is not something this app is willing to be.
Do other agents see the doors I have knocked?
No. There is no shared map, no leaderboard, and no other agent's copy of the app that your walks could reach. Your farm is yours.
Do I need a Google account?
Only if you want your own walk logs copied to your Google Drive, in a folder you name. It is off until you turn it on, and turning it off stops it.
How do I delete everything?
Delete the app. Everything it holds goes with it. There is nothing held elsewhere to request the deletion of, and no account to close.
Importing a list
Can I import a list? What file format?
CSV. That is the format every board tool, CRM and spreadsheet can export, which is why it is the one supported. Open the map and tap Import houses.
Tap Get the template on the import screen for a file with the right shape — it is easier to overwrite than to build from a description.
What columns does it need?
One: an address. Everything else is optional. The first row of the file must name the columns, and the matching is deliberately loose — an export from your CRM will not use our spelling, and rejecting the file would teach you the app is broken rather than that a header is wrong.
| Column | Header names accepted |
|---|---|
| address (required) | address, street address, property address, addr, location, full address |
| owner | owner, owner name, name, contact, contact name |
| phone | phone, phone number, tel, mobile, cell |
| note | note, notes, comment, comments, remark, remarks |
| tag | badge, tag, label |
| coordinates | lat / latitude / y and lng / lon / long / longitude / x |
Do I need latitude and longitude?
No — almost no real export has them. The app looks up the map position for each address itself. If your file does already have coordinates, they are used and the lookup is skipped, which is faster.
It said “No address column found”
The message lists the columns it actually saw in your file. Usually the first row
is data rather than headers, or the address column is called something not in the
list above. Rename it to address and import again.
Some addresses could not be placed on the map
The app names each one it could not find rather than just counting them. Usually it is a unit number in an unusual format, or a street spelled differently from the postal record. Fix those rows and import the file again — re-importing is safe.
Can I import a second list without losing the first?
Yes. Imports merge, and houses you already have are skipped rather than doubled. To start over, use Remove all imported houses on the import screen.
When it gets something wrong
I got a door I never knocked
It happens, and it is worth knowing exactly why. The detector records you stood still within 14 m for 20 seconds. It cannot tell the difference between that and a doorstep. So a false door is usually one of:
- you stopped on the sidewalk to type a note or take a call
- you waited at a corner or a crossing
- GPS drifted while you were stationary — most often between tall houses, under heavy tree cover, or in the first minute after leaving a car, before the fix settles
In version 1.0 a single door cannot be deleted from a saved walk. You can delete a whole walk — swipe left on it in History — but not one door within it. If false doors are costing you accuracy, please say so in an email; it is the strongest argument for building per-door editing next.
A door I definitely knocked is missing
The most likely cause by far is that you were quick — under 20 seconds at the door is not recorded, by design, because that threshold is what stops every pause on the sidewalk becoming a knock. The second most likely is location permission (see above): if every door after a certain point is missing rather than a scattered few, that is a permission problem, not a detection problem.
The map opens in the wrong city
Settings → My area → type a town or postal code, or tap Where I am. That one setting also decides which addresses appear first when you search. It normally configures itself from the houses you imported.
A conversation was logged where I only knocked
You stood at the door for 75 seconds or more. Waiting for someone slow to answer, or standing at the door writing up the previous house, both look identical to a conversation from the outside. The count is a good estimate of your day, not a record of what was said.
Getting a walk back
The app closed mid-walk. Did I lose the street?
Almost certainly not. A running walk is written to disk as it goes, not at the end, so a crash, a restart or iOS reclaiming memory costs you at most the last minute.
When you reopen the app, an unfinished walk from less than four hours ago is offered back to you, and you choose: continue it, or keep it as it stands. It is never resumed silently and never merged into a new walk — merging two walks would invent an afternoon that never happened, and discarding one would throw away real work.
I reopened it the next day and the walk was already closed
An unfinished walk older than four hours is closed automatically, ending at the last moment there was real activity — the last GPS point or the last door. That is so a walk you forgot to stop does not show up as a fourteen-hour day.
How far back does History go?
The most recent 60 walks are kept on the phone. Days with no doors and effectively no distance are cleaned up on their own — a “0h 00m · 0.0 km” entry is noise, not history.
Can I get a walk off the phone?
Turn on the Google Drive option and finished walk logs are copied to your own Drive folder. That is the current export path.
Reporting a bug
What helps most, in one email:
- what you expected, and what happened instead
- a screenshot if it is something you can see
- roughly when it happened — the date and the part of the day is enough to find the walk
- the address or street it happened on — only if you are comfortable sharing it. It is never required. If you would rather not, say “a house on a street with a unit number” and that is usually enough.
If the app closed on its own, say so and say what you were doing at the time. Crashes on a specific screen are the easiest kind of bug to fix and the hardest to guess at.
What version am I on?
TestFlight shows the version and build number beside the app. Include both — a bug already fixed in a newer build is worth knowing about, and so is one that came back.