Thanks for taking this for a walk. Five minutes of reading, then the app does the rest. Nothing here is precious — if something is confusing, that is the bug.
Install TestFlight from the App Store first, then open pond.eend.app/beta and tap the iPhone link. Pond Hopping lives inside TestFlight rather than on the App Store — that is normal for a test build, and it is one tap either way.
Being in the testers group is the access. Play checks the group, so there is no invitation to accept and no code to enter. Open the Play link, tap “Become a tester,” then install from the Play Store as normal. That order matters — the store page won’t show you the test build until you have said yes to it.
If the link turns you away, or the store page says “Item not found,” it is almost always the account: see below. Neither message is you doing it wrong.
It has to be the Google account signed in to the Play Store on the handset — the same one that is in the testers group. People often give us the address they read email at, which is not the one their phone is signed in with, and then the link turns them away for no visible reason. If you are not sure which you are signed in as, that is worth two seconds of checking now.
You already took the photographs. You shouldn’t also have to write the holiday down.
Pond Hopping is a travel log that fills itself in. You give it your photographs; it works out where you went and when, groups them into trips, tracks the flights, notices the weather you had, and writes the thing up so there is something to read afterwards.
The question we are actually testing is whether that feels like magic or like homework. Everything else is detail.
Email, Google or Apple. Email sends you a code, not a password — it should land in seconds. If it doesn’t, that alone is worth telling us.
It asks once. Do answer it properly — everything is measured from there, so a wrong home makes the app quietly stupid about what counts as a trip.
Two sit on the globe: Thailand is mid-trip right now and China & Japan is finished. There is a third — Lisbon & Porto, still to come — and it is on the Plan tab rather than the globe, because it is a plan rather than a trip that has happened. Between them they show what a full one looks like before you have one.
Upload photographs from a real trip you took, straight from your phone. Thirty is plenty. It should offer to make them a trip on its own — “this looks like a trip” — and you can say no, in which case they are kept loose in Photos rather than binned.
Open the Thailand example. There is a domestic flight to Phuket mid-trip — gate, seat, belt, the lot — and the flight home to Melbourne at the end of it, both counting down. Past flights show how they actually went, and any photographs you took on board.
Find a confirmation email in your inbox and paste the whole thing in — Plan → Add a booking. It should pull out the flights, hotels and times on its own. Messy real emails are the interesting ones.
Once a trip has photographs it writes itself, without being asked. Read it and tell us whether it sounds like a person or a robot. It may ask you a couple of things only you could know.
Bottom of a trip’s Overview. It should say plainly what goes and what stays — the photographs are kept and move to Photos. Worth checking that promise is true.
On any phone, any platform. Say it however you would say it out loud — “the button did nothing” is a good report. It already knows which build you are on, which screen you were looking at and what you tapped just before, so you are never asked any of that and never need to remember it. It reaches us within seconds.
Take a screenshot, then open the share sheet and choose Send Beta Feedback. It won’t prompt you — you have to go and find it. Handy for showing us something crooked. For anything you can describe in words, the in-app one is quicker and lands in the same place as everyone else’s.
Even for something tiny. A half-formed “this felt weird” at the time beats a considered write-up an hour later, and you will not remember the second one.
Don’t be polite about it. The useful reports are the ones that sound ungrateful — where you got stuck, where you stopped bothering, where you had to think.
If you put the phone down out of boredom, that is the single most valuable thing you can tell us, and it is the one nobody ever sends.
Photographs only, for now. Pick a video and it is left where it is — the app tells you how many it left behind rather than quietly dropping them. This one is being built, so it is worth telling us if you have a trip that is mostly video.
Wherever you say home is. They are one shared set of trips rather than yours, so the departure airport can’t follow you around yet.
That’s everything. If you get stuck badly enough to stop, that is the finding — send it and put it down. Nothing here is your fault, and nothing you do to it can break anything that matters.