It did not send, and your writing is not gone
Live · This works today.
A failed send never loses what you wrote. The message stays on your phone with a reason under it and a Try again button, and anything you recorded while offline sits in a queue that empties itself when a connection turns up. The reason line is the useful part — it names the cause rather than saying something went wrong.
What the line under a failed message means
What you typed is saved the moment you press send, before anything goes over the air — so a failure never costs you the message. The line underneath tells you which thing happened, and whether pressing Try again could possibly help.
That distinction is the whole reason the line exists. A Try again under a message that has used up the month's questions is a button that cannot work, and offering it once teaches you the buttons are decoration. So when trying again would not help, there is no button — just the sentence saying what would.
And it will not tell you that you have no signal unless you actually have no signal. If your phone says it is online, the message says the problem is at our end, because it is.
The short version
Your words are on your phone before they are anywhere else. A message is written down locally the moment you send it, and only then does it try to reach us. So a failure is a delivery problem, never a loss of what you typed.
That is why there is a reason line under a failed message rather than a spinner. You are not being asked to wait and hope — you are being told what happened and given the button that retries it.
Why this is its own page
These questions used to sit on the Talk page, among fifty-odd others about what the chat knows and how to talk to it.
Nobody arrives here from curiosity. You arrive because something just failed, and you want one answer quickly rather than a feature explained. Those are different jobs and they were sharing a page — so this is now the page you can land on, and Talk is the page you read.
What we have not fixed
The reason line is only as good as the reason. Some failures resolve to something genuinely useful — out of credits, no connection — and some resolve to a code that means little on its own. When you hit one of those, the pencil button on that screen sends it to us with the reason attached, and that is usually enough for us to find the cause.
We would rather show you an unhelpful reason than none at all. A message that sits there with nothing under it is the version we already shipped once, and it was worse.
Common questions
- Profile says changes are stuck and that it is your end. What does that mean?
It means our server keeps refusing something your phone is trying to send, and the fault is ours. The app is still trying — a refusal today can stop being one tomorrow, because we deploy fixes several times a day — and nothing is lost from your phone while it retries.
Before 17 August 2026 this said waiting to back up, which is also what a healthy phone says for the half-second before a sync finishes. So a real fault on our side looked exactly like everything being fine, and it stayed that way for hours. Now the two say different things.
If that message stays put, tell us with the pencil button. You seeing it is the only signal we get.
- It says I am online but cannot reach you. Is my data lost?
No. Anything you saved while it could not send is held on your phone and goes up on its own as soon as it can reach us — Profile shows how many are waiting, and the queue empties itself. The strip above the tab bar only speaks up when there is something to say — backing up now, waiting on a signal, or a backup that did not go through — so no message there means nothing is wrong. If you see that message, tap the pencil on that screen and send it to us: the reason now appears in brackets at the end, and that one word is usually enough for us to find the cause.
- A message would not send and Try again seems to do nothing. What now?
It is doing something — it re-sends every time you press it. The trouble was that when the failure is instant, the whole attempt finished in about nine milliseconds and nothing on screen changed, so a button that worked looked broken. Now it says "Tried again — same problem" when the second attempt hits the same wall, and the message tells you the actual reason in brackets. If it keeps failing, the pencil button on that screen sends us the details.
- My message did not send. What does the message under it mean?
Whatever went wrong, what you typed is saved and nothing is lost. The line under it says which of three things happened. If it says you have no signal, you have no signal. If it says it could not reach us though you are online, the problem is at our end and Try again is worth a go. If it says you have used the month's questions or need to sign in, there is no Try again, because pressing it could not help — the line tells you what would.
- What if I have no signal?
Most gardens are on wifi or a good phone signal, so that is what it is built for and it answers in a few seconds. If you are somewhere with nothing — a community garden plot, a walled garden — the message is saved and a Try again appears, so you have not lost what you typed.
- I asked something before signing in. Do I lose it?
No. The app needs a free account before it opens, Talk included. If you are ever signed out partway through a question, the line under it says so, with a Sign in link right there. Signing in brings you back to the same conversation, with your question still sitting there, and the line under it turns into Try again. One tap and it goes.
- I asked about a photo before signing in. Same thing?
Same thing now, though it took two goes. When a photo question cannot be sent because you are not signed in, the line under it says so and there is a Sign in link right there, which brings you back here afterwards. Until 4 September 2026 it instead said sign in on Profile — the wording we had already removed from the typed-question path in August, for the exact reason given in the answer above: that screen does not have the words sign in on it. The photo path never got the change, so this page described a fix that only half the app had. Both doors now read the same.
- A photo failed to send and Try again does nothing. What is going on?
An upload from a phone is long enough to catch a wifi-to-mobile handover or a sleeping radio, which the browser reports as a plain failure with no reason attached. The app has three goes of its own, a couple of seconds apart, before it says anything at all. If it still cannot, the message names the real reason rather than blaming your signal — and it includes the size and type of the photo that would not go, because a picture that fails when others succeed is usually about that picture. If you report one, that line in brackets is the useful part.
- It keeps saying the photo has not finished uploading. What now?
That should not happen any more, and if it does the message will name the actual reason rather than leaving you guessing. Photos used to travel with the general background upload, which meant a question about one could get stuck behind an unrelated photo that was having trouble. The photo you are asking about now goes up on its own, immediately, ahead of the queue — because you are standing there waiting for it.
- The stuck list says "A journal entry". It used to say "Something you logged".
Changed on 31 August 2026, because it had quietly stopped being true.
Rafe can write journal entries for you now — that is the whole point of using Talk while you walk around. So an entry the server refuses might be one you typed, or one Rafe wrote down when you said something out loud.
The old label said you logged it. For some of them that was simply wrong, and being told you did something to your own records that you did not do is worse than a vague label.
This list only knows what KIND of thing is stuck, never who made it — so it now names the thing rather than guessing at the author.
One more in the same list: A bed or spot is now A growing space, which is what the rest of the app calls it. Two names for one thing, on one screen, is how you end up wondering whether they are two different things.
Shipped 2026-08-04. Last checked 2026-09-29. Something here wrong or out of date? Tell us — support docs going stale is a bug.