How persistence works
A calm, honest answer to a common question: why the free version resets between launches, what a subscription keeps, and where your data actually lives.
On the free version of ASCND, every launch is a clean slate. Your reps, drills, diagnostics, and stats reset between sessions. This isn't a bug or a sync error — it's how the free experience is built. It keeps things focused on the work in front of you, today.
So if you practiced last week and opened the app to find a fresh start, nothing went wrong. That's the free version doing exactly what it's meant to.
A Premium subscription turns on lasting progress. Your history, stats, streaks, plans, and settings carry over from launch to launch and build over time. That continuity is the heart of what Premium gives you.
It's also where ASCND's recommendations get sharper — the engine runs on your accumulated history, so the more it remembers, the more it has to work with. See Pricing for what's included.
ASCND is local-first. Your practice history, rounds, and progress are stored on your device — not on our servers. ASCND runs no cloud sync and has no practice-data backend; it never uploads your practice off-device. Premium doesn't move it to the cloud — it simply lets the app keep what it records on your phone across launches instead of clearing it.
Your data & backups: because your data lives on your iPhone, it's included in your device's normal Apple backup when you turn one on (iCloud Backup or an encrypted computer backup) — the same way every app's data is. That's Apple's backup, controlled entirely by you; ASCND itself still uploads none of your practice. If you move to a new iPhone and restore from that backup, your practice is designed to come with it. What a backup can't help with: if you delete the app, or lose your phone with no backup, the data on that device is gone for good — neither Apple nor we can recover it.
A few operational things work the way they do in most apps and sit outside your practice data: your subscription runs through Apple, and the app uses standard crash-and-diagnostics reporting so we can keep it stable. None of that includes the contents of your practice. Full detail in the Privacy Policy.
If you were subscribed when you recorded your progress and it's not showing, that's worth a look. First, make sure Premium is active: open ASCND, go to Profile → Account, and tap Restore Purchases using the same Apple ID you subscribed with. Restore Purchases re-links your Premium access — it doesn't recover practice data. Restoring a full Apple device backup to a new iPhone is designed to bring practice data across; but anything removed from the device itself — for example by deleting the app, or losing a phone with no backup — can't be recovered by Apple or by us.
If Premium is active and progress is still missing, get in touch — see the FAQ for restore and refund steps, and email [email protected] so we can take a closer look.