r/finch

I wonder what happened to that, and if they’ll get back to it.

Good afternoon everyone, and hope everyone is having a great day.

Raven and I say have fun

Hey Finch users! I just wanted to post a reminder to anybody who hasn't already to either set up backups that get saved off of your device or to at least create an account and set yourself up with cloud syncs/backups (and use it as an opportunity to vent a little bit).

With everything going on in the world, I decided I was going to try out GrapheneOS on my phone last night. Awesome! I set everything up, looked through my apps and documents to see what I needed to offload, and then prepped the Pixel for flashing. After some trial and tribulation I was able to get the OS installed and... Wait, I forgot to backup Finch. Oh no. Panic set in hard for me and I downloaded and opened the app and... Nothing. I scrounged my cloud drives, I tried logging in with every email, nothing.

I emailed support last night and recently received feedback confirming what I knew in my heart, but hoped wasn't true. My Finch was gone. To the team's credit, they offered to give me a healthy amount of items of my choosing as well as rainbow stones if I decided to make a new bird. Obviously they can't recreate my whole bird, who I've had for I think 4 or 5 years now from scratch, but the travel history and all the personality quirks, likes/dislikes, and shared experiences are what made him him. It's a lot of history to lose. As such, I've opted to not create a new Finch and stop using the app. The idea of starting over feels absolutely insurmountable to me at the moment.

None of this is an indictment on the Finch team, they've been wonderful and the product is awesome, but I just wanted to post a reminder to all to make sure you set one of the two methods up to ensure this happens as little as possible. If you're like me and assign life to inanimate objects/fictional characters, you don't realize how much it will affect you until it does.

The cloud sync seems like a great tool, I wish it had existed when I first made my Finch (I didn't even know it existed until yesterday). If you haven't already, be sure you've made an account. I've been a Finch Premium subscriber for a while so I assumed I just... Had an account, but you have to manually do so (for privacy reasons, which makes sense).

The great irony to this is that GrapheneOS was too restrictive for a bunch of simpler services and I wound up reflashing PixelOS this morning, so I went through all this head & heartache for nothing.