Every question, answered straight

Automatically. Motion-aware background tracking records where you are through the day and attributes each calendar day to the state or country you were in, using the any-part-of-a-day standard residency audits use. There are no check-ins and no spreadsheets; a day at home still lands in the record via a daily heartbeat.

Yes. Days anywhere in the world resolve to the country you were in, and the app runs international clocks automatically: the rolling Schengen 90/180 window with a forecast of when a day frees up, the UK 183-day count against the April 6 tax year, the FEIE 330-day foreign-presence test, and Canada's 1,095-day citizenship count.

US state day counts against the 183-day statutory-residency standard, worldwide per-country day counts, the Schengen 90/180 window, the UK 183-day automatic residence test, the FEIE 330-day physical presence test, and Canada's 1,095-day citizenship presence requirement. The Substantial Presence Test and N-400 arithmetic are free calculators on this site for now.

Yes. When any count crosses into warning territory, or over a limit, Beacon sends a notification, even when the app is closed. Each crossing alerts once rather than nagging daily, and alerts arrive quietly in Notification Center.

No. Beacon uses motion-aware tracking rather than continuous GPS, and typically uses under 1% of battery per day. Day counting needs city-level fixes a few times a day, not a street-level trace.

Nowhere. Your location history is stored only on your phone. There is no account, no cloud copy, and nothing for anyone to buy or lose. The only thing that ever leaves the device is a report you explicitly choose to export and share.

The download is free and the app is fully usable for 14 days with no card required. After that it is a $29.99 per year subscription through the App Store. Nothing auto-charges during the trial.

Yes. Tap the state or country on that day in the Ledger to mark it travel-through: the record stays for completeness, but the day stops counting, which mirrors the transit exception many residency rules recognize. The app also spots likely pass-through days, like an airport connection, and suggests the tap.

Resolution runs offline against US Census state boundaries and a Natural Earth world map, verified against coastal cities and border cities like Windsor and Tijuana. Every day is reviewable in the Ledger, so an odd attribution is visible and correctable by marking it travel-through, rather than hidden in a total.

A per-state summary against the 183-day threshold, an international section with each clock and its window, and a day-by-day appendix with timestamps and record counts. Travel-through days appear struck through and labeled rather than silently removed, so the record stays complete.

GPS itself works without a network, so days are usually still recorded. If the phone genuinely cannot get a fix for a stretch, that gap is visible in the Ledger rather than silently filled in; the record only claims what was actually observed.

The record shows what the phone saw, so a day your phone stayed home is attributed to wherever it sat. You can tap Record now anytime to log where you actually are. Adding or editing past days by hand is not supported yet; it is on the roadmap, and we would mark manual entries as such to keep the record honest.

Not yet. Counting is state-level today, so a Manhattan day is a New York State day. NYC has its own residency tax and is on the roadmap as a separate count; the underlying record already stores precise coordinates, so history will apply retroactively when it ships.

No. Beacon is the location record; keep supporting documents in your own files. The day-by-day export is designed to sit alongside receipts in a residency file, not replace them.

No, deliberately. Keeping the history on one device with no account is what makes the privacy promise real. The free calculators on this site cover the planning math without needing your data.

Not yet. SpyglassBeacon is iPhone-first while the tracking loop is proven to audit standards. Android is planned.

No. It is an informational tool that keeps a contemporaneous, timestamped record of your days and the standard day-count arithmetic. Residency determinations involve facts beyond day counts; bring the export to a qualified adviser.

Because it is contemporaneous and complete: recorded day by day as you lived it, timestamped, with excluded days shown rather than deleted. Auditors discount reconstructions from memory; a record kept at the time, produced consistently, is the strongest evidence a day count can have.