Support
Rep finds the handstands in your camera roll, cuts each rep out of the video it is buried in, and times how long you stayed on your hands. Everything is analysed on the phone; nothing is uploaded.
Getting started
- Choose Allow Full Access on the Photos prompt This is the one that matters, and Rep needs it. With anything less — a selection you picked by hand, or no access at all — Rep does not scan, because a hand-picked selection cannot hold the handstand you filmed three years ago and forgot about. If you have already chosen a selection, Rep shows a screen saying it needs full library access, with a shortcut into Settings so you can change it; the scan starts the next time you open Rep after that.
- Leave the app open for the first stretch iOS suspends apps that go into the background, so the fastest progress happens while Rep is on screen. Progress shows in the pill at the top right, and reps appear as they are found, newest first.
- Then let it work in the background After that first stretch Rep keeps going on its own when iOS gives it time, which in practice means mostly while the phone is charging. Recent videos are picked up without needing a charger; the older backlog waits for one. Allow notifications if you would like to be told when it has found something.
- New videos look after themselves Once you are caught up, anything you film is picked up the next time the app runs, in minutes rather than hours.
How long the first scan takes
It depends on how big your library is and how often your phone is charging, so there is no number that is true for everyone. Catching up on recent videos with the app open is a matter of hours rather than minutes; working back through years of footage is slower, because iOS hands out background time in short bursts and mostly while the phone is on a charger.
For a sense of scale, this has been measured on one phone: an iPhone 17 Pro with a library of about eleven thousand videos, running an earlier version of Rep. Over five weeks of ordinary use the backlog shrank by about a hundred videos a day on average — and the spread is the part worth knowing, because a single rate hides it. The typical day cleared nearer sixty; the best day cleared nearly four hundred; on some days it cleared none, or the backlog even grew slightly. iOS decides when the app runs, and some days it barely does.
The arithmetic that follows from that is slower than it sounds: eleven thousand videos is about seventy hours of background work, and this phone was granted under an hour of usable background time a day, so on that version a library that size works out at three months or more before it is fully caught up, and about four at the average rate above. Since then Rep has stopped re-trying videos it cannot read and stopped redoing work it had already finished, which should make it quicker; that has not been measured on a phone yet, so plan on months, not weeks. A smaller library is far quicker, a phone that is often charging is quicker again, and time with the app open counts for much more than time in the background. These are observations from a single phone, not a promise about yours.
Finding your way around
- Sessions. Reps are grouped by when you filmed them; a gap of more than two hours starts a new session. Each session shows how many reps and the total time on hands, and leads with its longest hold as the large tile.
- Time on hands. The amber stretches on a rep's scrub bar are the seconds you were actually on your hands. Free balance, against a wall and held by a spotter all count. Feet resting on a box or back on the floor do not — the hold ends when a foot touches support again.
- Possible handstands. A collapsed strip under the session for reps Rep was not confident about. Open a rep and tap It's a handstand to move it up to the session proper.
- Hidden. Anything you dismiss goes into its own strip rather than vanishing, and Restore brings it back.
- Tags. Shape tags on each rep — straight, tuck, straddle, press, wall, spotter, box — so you can filter for the ones you want.
- Sharing. Share renders just that rep as a video — with your time on hands on it, in the templates that show it — and hands it to the normal iOS share sheet. Your original video is never altered; a rep is only a start and end time until you share it.
Known limits
These are the things Rep genuinely does not do well yet, listed rather than hidden.
- It misses some reps, and lets a few wrong things through. Borderline cases land in Possible handstands for you to judge, which is where the occasional cartwheel or downward dog shows up too.
- The first scan is slow. There is no way around actually watching every video, and iOS, not Rep, decides how much background time it gets.
- Short clips and screen recordings are skipped. Videos under two seconds and anything recorded off a screen are never looked at. Photos are not either.
- It does not know who is in the video. Every handstand in your library is shown, including other people's. There is no filter for "just me" yet.
- Rep has no backup or sync of its own. After moving to a new phone, or deleting and reinstalling, expect to scan again. Your videos are unaffected either way.
- Videos it cannot read are set aside. If a video fails to decode twice, Rep stops trying it until the app is next updated, so one broken file cannot hold up the rest.
- iPhone, portrait, iOS 17 or later. No iPad-specific layout and no landscape.
Common questions
Are my videos uploaded anywhere?
No. Rep contains no networking code at all — no HTTP client, no sockets, no web view, no analytics or crash-reporting library and no third-party SDK — so there is nothing in the app that could upload anything. The privacy policy sets out exactly what it works out and where that is kept.
Why does it want my whole library?
Because the history is the point. A limited selection shows Rep only the items you picked by hand, which cannot surface the handstand you filmed three years ago and forgot about — so rather than scan a handful of items and call that your history, Rep does not scan at all without full access. Rep only reads: it contains no code that changes, adds to or deletes anything in Photos. (If you share a rep and choose Save Video, iOS saves that clip as a new video, because you asked it to.)
Will it change or delete my original videos?
No. A rep is stored as a start and end time inside your video. The clip is rendered fresh at the moment you share it, and the original is left exactly as it was.
It says it found nothing.
If Rep is showing Rep needs full library access instead of your sessions, that is the photo permission and nothing else: set Settings → Rep → Photos to Full Access, then reopen Rep. If instead it is showing an empty library, reopen Rep and leave it on screen for a while — a scan that has not reached the older part of your library yet looks like this.
Why did it call that a handstand?
Anything in Possible handstands is a guess Rep is explicitly unsure about — dismiss it and it moves to Hidden. Something wrong in the session proper is a mistake worth reporting: what to send is below.
How do I delete everything Rep knows?
Delete the app. That removes its database of reps, its thumbnails, its preferences and its log, which is everywhere Rep keeps anything on the phone. Your videos stay in Photos untouched. You can also withdraw photo access on its own in Settings → Rep. If you have emailed support, ask and that email is deleted too; the privacy policy has the details.
If something looks wrong
Email the address below and describe it. Rep has no crash reporter and no analytics of its own, so a note from you is the best way a problem gets found; the other signals are the crash reports Apple passes on from people who have chosen to share them, and App Store reviews.
What makes a report useful, roughly in order:
- which iPhone, and which version of iOS;
- what you did, and what happened instead of what you expected;
- whether a scan was running and roughly how far it had got — the progress pill at the top right of the sessions screen;
- a screenshot, if there is anything to see.
What happens to your email once it arrives — used to reply, fix the problem and improve Rep, and deleted within 12 months of your last message, or sooner if you ask — is in the privacy policy.
Rep does keep a plain-text diagnostic log on the phone while it scans — progress, stage timings and counts, with no video and no images in it — but this version has no way to get that file off the device, so there is nothing to attach and nothing to go looking for. Not being able to export it is a known gap. Until it closes, the description above is what makes a problem fixable.
Contact
Rep is made by one developer, so a reply may take a few days. A note saying which iPhone you are on, what you did and what happened gets to an answer much faster than one without.