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Foilio turns photographs from your own iPhone into collectible cards, each with a rarity rolled at random and a foil pattern no other card has. Around that sits a collection to fill: a discovery index of things you have photographed, a map of places you have been, and a daily allowance that decides how much of it you can do in one sitting.

The numbers below are read out of the shipping build. If your question is not answered here, write to support@n1apps.com and a person will reply.

Common questions

Why can a photo only become a card once?

Because a card is meant to be a record of a photograph, not a renewable resource. Once a photo has been used, Foilio writes it into a permanent list and will not use it again — not through the picker, and not when a pack is drawing at random.

That list survives deleting the card. If it did not, the whole economy would come apart: you could mint your best photograph, collect the experience, credits, shards and discovery bounty, delete the card and do it again, forever. The rule is what makes running out of photos mean something.

Your library is not affected in any way. Foilio records what it has used and refuses it afterwards. It never deletes, moves, edits or hides anything in Photos.

The one thing that gives every photo back is Erase everything in Settings, which also deletes your entire collection. See below.

Where does film come from, and when does it refill?

Film is the daily allowance. One card costs one film, whether it comes from the camera, the picker or a pack — a five-card pack costs five film.

• On the free tier you get 10 film a day, plus two more for every level you have reached, up to a ceiling of 24 — which you hit at level 7. Levelling up is how the allowance grows until then.
• With Foilio Pro or the lifetime unlock it is a flat 150 a day from the moment the purchase lands, with no curve to climb.
• It refills at midnighton your device’s local calendar. There is nothing to claim and no timer to watch: the meter is simply full again the next day.
• No in-game currency converts into film. Credits cannot buy shots. Film is the one hard limit in the app, and it stays hard.
• A shot that produces no card — you cancel, or the photo cannot be read — is handed straight back.

Film bought with money is separate and never expires. It sits in your bag as rolls rather than in the day’s meter, and you load a roll into the meter when you want it. Leaving it there for a year costs you nothing.

Changing the device clock does not help. The day counter only moves forward. Setting the date back will not produce a fresh roll, a fresh set of quests or another streak reward. Setting it forward rolls the day over, and the real date arriving later then does nothing — so you skip a day rather than gain one.

If I delete Foilio and reinstall it, what happens to what I bought?

It depends on what it was, and the difference is important.

• Foilio Pro and the lifetime unlock come back. Apple holds them against your Apple Account. Reinstall, sign in to the same Apple Account, and tap Restore Purchases.
• Credits, film, shards and the welcome bundle do not come back. They are consumables. Apple never replays a consumable purchase, so there is nothing to restore, and no one — including us — can return them.
• Your collection does not come back.Cards, progress, streak, Foilodex and Atlas all live in the app’s storage on the device, and deleting the app deletes them. There is no cloud save.

The reason consumables work this way is worth knowing before you buy. There is no Foilio server keeping track of what you have spent. If currency were restorable, deleting and reinstalling would hand it over again for the same one payment, without limit. Making it a consumable is the only way to prevent that with no server to arbitrate — and it is why the honest advice is to buy currency to spend it, not to bank it.

Before you delete anything, share out the cards you care about. A shared card is an image file you keep; there is no backup file and no bulk export.

How do I restore purchases?

Open Settings inside Foilio and tap Restore Purchases. Foilio asks Apple what your Apple Account owns and applies whatever comes back. It works offline in the sense that an entitlement already confirmed once keeps working without a connection, but the restore itself needs the App Store to answer.

If it says there is nothing to restore, check in this order:

• You are signed in to the same Apple Accountthat made the purchase. Settings app → your name → Media & Purchases.
• You are only trying to restore something restorable. Currency is not (see above), and “nothing to restore” is the correct and expected answer for anyone who only ever bought currency.
• A subscription is still active rather than expired. An expired subscription restores nothing, because there is nothing to restore.
• The purchase was on a Family Sharing account — shared purchases do restore, but the sharer’s subscription must still be active.

Foilio never asks for your App Store password on its own. If a password prompt appears without you tapping Restore or Buy, it did not come from us.

How do I cancel Foilio Pro?

Through the App Store. Nothing inside Foilio can cancel a subscription, and neither can we — Apple holds the billing relationship.

On your iPhone: Settings app → your name → Subscriptions → Foilio → Cancel Subscription. Foilio’s paywall also has a direct link to that screen.

• Cancel at least 24 hours before the period ends, or Apple will have already taken the renewal.
• Cancelling stops the next charge. It does not cut short the period you have paid for — Pro benefits run to the end of it.
• Anything you earned while subscribed is yours to keep. What stops is the 150-a-day film allowance, the 250-credit daily stipend, the shortened pity counter and access to the locked part of the Foilodex — the four things Pro grants, and the only four.
• Buying the lifetime unlock does not cancel a subscription. Apple will bill both. Foilio notices and says so, but you have to cancel it yourself.

Refunds are Apple’s to give, at reportaproblem.apple.com. We cannot issue one and cannot see your purchase history.

Why does the Atlas want my location, and does it work offline?

The Atlas is the second collection: instead of collecting what is in your photographs, it collects where they were taken — spots, zones, cities, countries and continents. To do that a card needs to know where it was made.

There are two ways it finds out, and neither is a background job:

• The App’s own camera. While the viewfinder is open, Foilio keeps a current position ready so that pressing the shutter stamps the card immediately rather than stalling for ten seconds. This is why it asks for While Using the App location, and it stops the moment you close the viewfinder.
• A photo that already carries a location. When a pack draws a photo that has coordinates in its own metadata, Foilio reads them. No extra permission is involved.

Yes, it works offline — entirely. Turning a coordinate into a city and a country is done against a small dataset compiled into the app, not by a geocoding service. No coordinate is ever sent anywhere, there is no rate limit, and the Atlas fills in normally in airplane mode. That was the point: the person the feature exists for is usually abroad with data roaming switched off.

Declining is fine.Cards without a location are marked “off the grid” and everything else works. Most photo libraries have no location on a large share of their photos anyway, so this is a normal state rather than a failure.

Foilio never scans your library for locations. Only a photo you actually turned into a card gets a place recorded. If you want the places gone, the Atlas screen has Forget every place, which strips the location from every card and keeps the cards.

How do I erase everything?

Open Settings inside Foilio and tap Erase everything. You are asked to confirm first, and the confirmation is the last chance — this cannot be undone.

It removes, in one pass:

• every card in your collection;
• every photo copy, thumbnail and subject cut-out Foilio had stored on the device;
• your credits, film, shards, keys, experience, level, streak, quest progress, pity counter and every ledger of what has already been paid out;
• your Foilodex discoveries and every Atlas place, including all recorded locations;
• every setting and every scheduled notification.

The next launch is a first launch, from onboarding. Your photos in the Photos app are untouched, and every one of them becomes usable again.

Two things it does not do. It does not refund anything — unspent credits, film and shards are erased with everything else, including any bought with money. And it does not reach Apple: Foilio Pro and the lifetime unlock still belong to your Apple Account and come back with Restore Purchases.

Smaller options if erasing everything is more than you want: delete a single card from its detail screen, or use Forget every place on the Atlas to clear locations while keeping the cards.

The odds

Foilio publishes every random rate it uses on its own odds screen, reachable from Settings. That screen is the authority — it reports the numbers the version you are running actually uses, including the ones that differ by tier. The tables here are the base rates, for reference.

Rarity

Every card rolls one of seven tiers:

Three things move those numbers, and all three are disclosed:

• Your first card is guaranteed Rare or better. It happens once per collection and does not come back — emptying your album does not re-arm it.
• A well-composed photo pulls better.Foilio reads Apple’s on-device image aesthetics score — the same number behind the grade on the card — and a positive score shifts up to 40% of Common’s weight onto Rare and above, split in proportion to what those tiers already had. A score at or below zero changes nothing, and the boost never applies to the first card or to a pity payout.
• The pity counter — below.

Two packs also carry a rarity boost of their own, because they are the two pools you cannot inflate on demand: Starred and Throwback.

The pity counter

The counter shown in the app is how many cards you have made since your last Epic or better.

At 40 the next roll is forced into the Epic, Legendary, Crimson and Zenith pool — 20 on Foilio Pro or the lifetime unlock. The relative weights inside that pool still apply, so a forced roll can pay out higher than Epic. Pulling any Epic or better resets it, whether the counter forced it or not. It belongs to you, not to a photo, and it survives deleting cards.

Upgrading can destroy the card

The fusion bench raises a card one tier. It consumes fodder cards of the same tier plus a credit fee, then rolls. The chance depends on the tier being reached:

On a failure the card is destroyed, along with the fodder. It is removed from your collection and its stored photo copy is deleted from the device. Part of its value is returned as salvage credits, and the fee is spent either way. There is no undo, no backup and no way for anyone to bring it back.

The odds are shown before you commit. Nothing in Foilio requires you to upgrade anything, and a card sealed in a slab cannot be used as fodder or as a target — that is what a slab buys.

One side effect. The Foilodex reflects what your current collection has unlocked. If a destroyed or deleted card was the only one carrying a particular label, that entry goes back to locked until something else recognises the same thing. The experience and credits from the original discovery are yours to keep, but the discovery has already been paid, so re-unlocking it will not pay again.

Packs, currency and progress

The five packs

A pack pulls photos from your library at random and makes cards from all of them. You do not choose which. They differ by which photos are in the hat, not by quality:

Film is charged on top, one per card. No pack is free — not on the free tier and not on Foilio Pro. There used to be a once-a-day free draw and it was removed: on the free tier it handed out a pack whether or not you played, and on Pro it was worth about the same as the credit stipend Pro already pays, which is the same benefit sold twice. Packs are bought with credits at every tier now, and the subscription sells the credits. About one pack in eleven contains a locked crate; opening one costs a key, and a key costs 450 shards or arrives free on every seventh day of a streak.

What a card pays

On top of that:

• a new Foilodex discovery pays 15 XP and 10 credits;
• completing a whole set pays 200 XP and 500 credits;
• a new Atlas place pays by scale — 5 XP / 2 credits for a spot, up to 600 XP / 750 credits for a continent;
• three quests rotate daily — one for minting, one for discovering, one for rarity — paying between 40 and 160 credits each;
• a bounty board of three dex targets, one in easy reach, one worth an errand and one a genuine chase, paying 40 / 100 / 300 XP and 15 / 35 / 120 credits on top of the ordinary discovery reward, with five re-rolls a day;
• the daily streak pays 20 credits multiplied by its length, capped at 200 from day ten, plus a free case key on every seventh day;
• reaching a level pays 60 credits plus 15 per level, and every third level — the ones that change your rank — pays 220 plus 35 per level instead;
• Foilio Pro and the lifetime unlock add a stipend of 250 credits a day, claimable once daily.

Discoveries, sets and places only ever pay once. Foilio keeps a permanent record of what it has already paid you for, so deleting a card and using another photo of the same thing will not pay the bounty again.

Levels and ranks. Level n needs 100n² + 100n total XP — 200 for level one, 600 for level two, 1,200 for level three. The rank badge changes every three levels through eight bands: Paper, Gloss, Foil, Prism, Chrome, Aurora, Galaxy, Mythic.

What the three currencies are for

• Credits buy packs and pay the fusion fee. You start with 120.
• Film is the daily allowance — see above. It is the only thing no currency can buy.
• Shards pay the grading desk to seal a card in a slab, buy keys for crates, and buy extra showcase slots. A slab costs 80 shards for a Rare and rises to 900 for a Zenith, and the desk only accepts cards of Rare or above carrying a grade of Excellent or better. The showcase starts at three slots and can be expanded to five.

The Foilodex

The Foilodex has 971 entries across ten sets. Each one corresponds to something Apple’s on-device image classifier can name.

When you make a card, that classifier runs on the device and Foilio keeps up to ten labels that scored at least 20% confidence. Any that match a Foilodex entry unlock it in the reveal. Locked entries are shown as masked names, so you always know the length of the word and what it starts with. Completing every entry in a set pays once.

On the free tier the discoverable part of the dex is the In Reach tier — 135 entries, the things in an ordinary home or on the street outside it — and the counter is measured against that, so you are never shown a total you cannot reach. Foilio Pro and the lifetime unlock open all 971.

Why did my photo unlock nothing, or the wrong thing?

This is the most common question, and it is almost always one of these.

The classifier was not confident enough. Anything under 20% confidence is discarded. Blurry, dark, cluttered or very tightly cropped photos often produce nothing above that floor. Try a cleaner shot: more light, more of the subject in frame, less going on behind it.

It only reached the general category. The classifier answers in chains running from general to specific — animal, then bird, then pelican. A photo that is not clear enough to reach the specific end gives you the broad end, and the broad end may not be an entry at all.

It kept only its ten best guesses. A busy photo can produce far more than ten labels, and a small object at the edge of a crowded scene gets pushed out by whatever fills the frame.

The thing is not in the dex.The 971 entries come from the classifier’s own vocabulary, which does not cover everything. Specific brands, specific people, text and most one-off man-made objects have no entry.

You already had it. An entry unlocked by an earlier card stays unlocked, and only the first card to unlock it pays.

The photo is square-cropped first. Foilio crops to a centre square before anything else happens. A subject near the left or right edge of a wide photo may fall outside the square that gets analysed. Crop it yourself first, or reframe and reshoot.

The card’s title comes from the same labels, which is why a photo that recognises nothing is titled with its date instead of a name.

Permissions

Camera is asked for only when you choose to take a photo inside Foilio. Decline it and everything else still works — use the picker or a pack instead.

Photo library is asked for when you open a pack, because the whole point is that Foilio picks for you. If you grant limitedaccess, packs draw only from the photos you selected — widen it in the Settings app under Privacy & Security → Photos if packs keep offering the same shots. Choosing one specific photo through the picker needs no library access at all.

Locationis asked for by the Atlas, While Using the App only, and is read only while Foilio’s viewfinder is open. See the Atlas answer above.

Foilio does not ask for contacts, microphone, calendar, health data or tracking permission, and does not read your advertising identifier.

Notifications

All notifications are local — scheduled by the app on your own device. There is no push server and no push token, so no one can send you anything through Foilio. The rules it holds itself to:

• at most three a day, and at least four hours apart;
• nothing before 09:00 or from 21:00 onward, in your local time;
• nothing at all on a day you have already opened the app;
• every message is about your own state — your streak, your pity counter, a quest you nearly finished, film that has refilled — so a day with one thing worth saying gets one notification and a day with nothing gets none;
• no badge. A red dot you cannot clear without opening the app is a nag, not a notification.

Turn them off inside Foilio, or in the Settings app under Notifications → Foilio, whenever you like.

Privacy, in one paragraph

Your photos, cards, locations and progress stay in Foilio’s own storage on your device. There is no account, no Foilio server, no advertising and no tracking, and nothing measures what you do inside the app. The subject cut-out, the labels and the aesthetics score are all produced by Apple’s Vision framework running locally, and place resolution runs against a dataset compiled into the app — no image and no coordinate is sent anywhere for processing. Purchases go through Apple, who never gives us your payment details. One thing does leave the device: when you buy something, a record of that purchase and an anonymous installation identifier go to RevenueCat, our purchase-analytics processor. Nothing else does. The full detail is in the privacy policy.

Getting cards off the device

A card’s detail screen has a share button. Foilio renders the card face as an image, hands it to the standard iOS share sheet, and stops there — you save it to Photos, AirDrop it, message it, or send it wherever you like. Foilio does not know or record where it went.

There is no bulk export and no backup file. If you want a record of a collection, share the cards you care about individually. A card image you save back into Photos is marked as Foilio’s own, so packs will not deal you a card of a card.

Something is wrong

A photo will not become a card. Some images cannot be decoded — screenshots of protected content, damaged files, a few unusual formats. Your film is handed back when a shot produces no card. Try another photo, or open the original in Photos and export a copy first.

A pack says it cannot find photos. Either photo library access was declined, the granted selection has no matching images, or every photo that matches has already been used. Each pack tells you which. Widen a limited selection in the Settings app.

The cards look flat, with no motion. The foil is a live shader. If the movement looks frozen, check the Settings app under Accessibility → Motion → Reduce Motion — Foilio deliberately calms its animation when that is on. The foil itself still renders.

The shop is empty or prices will not load. Product details come from the App Store, so this is usually a connection problem. Try again with a connection; the retry button re-asks. Being offline never takes away anything you already own.

I paid and got nothing. Foilio only tells Apple a purchase is complete once the goods are actually written to your device, so an interrupted purchase stays open and is delivered the next time you open the app. Open it once more before doing anything else. If it still has not arrived, write to us with the date and the product, and contact Apple at reportaproblem.apple.com.

My streak or film looks wrong after travelling.The day counter only moves forward. Crossing time zones westward can cost one day’s refresh; it corrects itself the next day.

Everything is gone.If the app was deleted and reinstalled, or the device was restored without Foilio’s data, the collection is gone — there is no cloud copy to pull it back from. That is the trade-off of an app that never uploads anything. Foilio Pro and the lifetime unlock can still be restored.

Contact

One address, and it reaches a person rather than a ticket queue. It is the same address used for privacy questions.

Email: support@n1apps.com

Tell us which iPhone and which iOS version you are on, and what happened. Screenshots help. If it is about a specific card, the number printed on it helps. If it is about a purchase, the date and the product name help. Foilio is made by one person, so replies are not instant, but every message is read.

For billing, cancellation and refunds, Apple is faster than we are: support.apple.com/billing. The Terms of Service set out the rules for purchases and the game systems.