PSA: If TV Time won't open, your watch history is probably still on your phone. Here's how to get it back (iOS + Android)
Seeing a lot of "the app won't open, I lost everything" posts this week. Most of you probably haven't lost it. TV Time cached your whole history locally on the device, separate from the export a lot of people missed. If the app is still installed, that cache is very likely still there and recoverable.
Writing this up in one place because the same questions keep coming around.
Before anything else — do NOT do these:
- Don't uninstall the app
- Don't update it
- Don't factory reset or "clear cache/storage"
Any of those wipes the local copy, and right now it's the only copy left. Get the file off the device first, decide what to do with it second.
iPhone / iPad
The file is DioCache.db, an SQLite database inside TV Time's app container (it's the cache for the app's HTTP client, "Dio"). To pull it:
- Install iMazing (free trial, Windows or Mac).
- Plug in the phone, find TV Time under Apps, browse into its Documents folder, and export DioCache.db out.
- 3uTools works too if you'd rather not use iMazing.
An old iPhone backup works as a source as well, if you have one lying around.
Android
Harder, and honestly a coin flip. Without root, try:
adb backup -noapk com.tvshowtime.tvshowtime
It only works if the app allows backups, and newer Android versions often refuse. If it produces a file, the .ab is a zlib-wrapped tar — strip the 24-byte header, inflate, untar — and the same DioCache.db is inside. If backups are blocked and you're not rooted, I don't have a clean answer, but the file is still on the device, so hang onto the phone until a tool shows up.
What's actually in it
Show and movie names, TVDB/TV Time IDs, watched episode counts, per-episode watch flags and dates, follow status, ratings, poster URLs. One honest caveat people keep running into: the cache reliably knows how many episodes you watched of a show, but not always exactly which ones — so if you jumped around out of order, that part comes back approximate. Watched-in-order histories come back clean.
Where to take it once you have it
A few of us have been building parsers and importers this week — search this sub for "DioCache" and you'll find them, including a browser-only extractor by u/Joemag_xD where nothing leaves your machine. Several trackers now read it or the official GDPR zip directly.
Disclosure since it's relevant and I'd rather say it up front: I build one of them (bobinapp.com — free, no ads). It takes DioCache.db as-is and keeps your original watch dates. But the recovery steps above are the part that matters and they work no matter which app you land on — Trakt, Simkl, Serializd, whatever fits you. Get the file out first. That's the thing that isn't recoverable later.