A few answers.

And a way to reach a real person.

The café I'm in isn't in the list

Tap Search by name at the bottom of the check-in sheet. The nearby list comes from Apple Maps, which sometimes files a coffee shop under something else entirely — searching by name finds it anyway. Include the city if the shop is far from you.

Nothing shows up nearby at all

Bloom asks for your location only at the moment you tap Check In. If you declined the prompt, the list will be empty — turn it back on in Settings → Privacy & Security → Location Services → Bloom, or use Home Brew, which needs no location at all.

How does a café get brighter?

Each shop's glow is derived from how many times you've checked in there. It steps up as your visits accumulate, so the places you actually keep going back to are the ones that read brightest on the map.

I made a mistake in a visit

Tap the glow to open that shop's timeline, then tap the visit to edit it, or swipe to delete. When a shop's last visit is deleted, the shop dissolves off the map with it.

Where is my data?

On your phone. There is no account and no server of ours. If you turn on iCloud sync in Settings, it syncs through your own private iCloud database — still not somewhere we can see it. See Privacy.

Will it stay free?

Yes. No ads, no subscription, no surprise "pro" wall.

My city's stamp doesn't look like my city

Fair. There are 293 of them and they were drawn one at a time, so some are better than others. Tell us which one and what it should have been — that is a genuinely useful email to get.

Anything else, write to support@shuaiyuan.me and a real person will write back.