What Gravl Macros Remembers About You

The choices that follow you to a new phone, the ones that don't, and the handful of things the app works out from your habits without being asked.

Updated

Three kinds of memory

Beyond your food and your weight, the app holds on to a lot of small preferences. They fall into three groups, and the difference matters most on the day you get a new phone.

What follows your account

These live with your account and appear on any device you sign in to:

Theme, language and Spanish vocabularyHaptics on or off
Which progress-photo poses you showStreak and achievement celebrations
Your daily water targetThe three Quick logging toggles
Whether you dismissed the Discover bannerYour notification preferences

What stays on the phone

These are stored on the device and do not travel. Set them up again after a switch:

The order of your menu shortcutsThe order of your dashboard pages, and which one it reopens on
Remaining-or-consumed on the dashboardJournal sort order
Which Insights cards you show, and their orderWhich body metrics you show
Framing in the full-screen photo cameraThe nutrition-label layout you last used

This is the answer to "I changed phones and my shortcuts are gone". Nothing was lost — those preferences simply never left the old device.

One detail about that camera row: only the full-screen photo camera keeps your last framing. The cameras that open as a sheet — quick photo logging, and the packaging photos on a custom food — always start square, because there the aspect ratio is also the height of the sheet.

What the app works out on its own

Four things are learned from what you do, without a setting to turn them on.

Your portion and unit, per food. Every time you log something, the app records the serving size you used, the unit you picked, and any custom portion you defined for it. Next time that food comes up, those are already filled in. This one does sync, so a food you logged in grams on your phone comes up in grams on a new one. There is no screen listing it — the way to change what it remembers is to log that food differently.

When you usually eat. With Automatic meal reminders on, the app takes the median time you log each meal over the last 28 days, adds half an hour, and reminds you then. It needs at least 8 logged instances before it will move off your fixed time, and it won't shift a reminder by less than 15 minutes, so it drifts rather than jumps. The chip on the notifications screen shows the time it settled on.

How your day usually paces. The rings on the date strip judge today against how you normally eat by that hour, rather than against a flat share of the day. That curve is the median of your last 28 days, and a day only counts toward it if it looks properly logged — at least two entries and 800 kcal — so a day you only logged a coffee doesn't teach it that you eat everything by 9am.

Which foods to keep on your phone. Your recent and repeated foods are downloaded so search works offline. Foods you stop using eventually drop out, which is why an obscure item from a year ago may need a connection to find again. Your old entries are unaffected: each one stores its own name and macros at the time you logged it.

What isn't remembered

Some things people expect to be sticky, and aren't. The period you last chose on a chart resets to the default when you leave the screen. And there is no history of dismissed things beyond the Discover banner.

Clearing it

Signing out normally clears the local data from the phone, and deleting your account removes the account-level settings along with everything else — see delete your account for exactly what goes and what stays.

The learned preferences above have no separate off switch. If you want the app to forget a portion, log that food at a different size; if you want it to forget your meal times, set a fixed reminder time instead of Automatic.