Support
Start with the symptom, not the settings
Three symptoms worth writing down: an account that hasn’t arrived on a new phone, a referral Pass that never landed, and a button in the browser that says it’s on mobile.
Two addresses, both read by a person · No chat widget, no ticket number
Your account
Your dogs and history aren’t on the new phone yet
What you’re seeing. A banner across the top of Home reading “Restoring your account…”, with “Your dogs, reads and settings are on their way” under it. Or the version nobody wants: “Couldn’t load your account data” — “Check your connection — we’ll keep trying. Your data is safe in the cloud.” — and a Retry button. On a fresh install the same moment can arrive as a whole screen with Rex sitting on it: “Bringing your pack home”, or “Let’s reconnect” with Try again and Use another account.
What’s happening. Your pack, every read, the journal and the album live in your account, not in the installed app. On sign-in the cloud is the side that wins, and until that first load comes back, the phone in your hand is showing you defaults. So what failed is the fetch, not the data — and a fetch needs a connection that answers, not one that merely exists.
One thing is deliberately true while that banner is up: the phone can’t write. Write-through stays switched off until a load returns clean, so a half-restored device can’t push its empty pack over your real one, and a device signing in fresh is only ever allowed to seed an account that doesn’t exist yet. Nor does it quietly give up — it retries fast a few times, then again every minute, for as long as the app is open. Retry only skips the wait. Account and data has the long version of why signing in is the restore.
One fork before you try anything else. If what arrives is empty rather than wrong, the load probably worked and you’re in the wrong account — the second Google account on the phone is the usual culprit. “Use another account”, on the reconnect screen, signs out so you can try the other one.
Get a real connection
A café wifi page you haven’t accepted yet looks online to Android and answers nothing. Mobile data is the quickest way to rule it out.
Tap Retry
It resets the backoff and goes again immediately, rather than sitting out the rest of the current gap. It skips the wait; it doesn’t change the answer.
Leave it open a minute
The retry keeps coming on its own. A restore that failed on the platform can land on the walk home without you touching anything.
Reinstalling isn’t a repair. A fresh install runs exactly the same restore, over exactly the same connection, and asks the server exactly the same question. If the answer isn’t arriving, a second install doesn’t change who is refusing to answer.
What a new phone is actually doing
- You sign inThe pack lives in the account, not in the installed app
- You are seeing defaultsUntil the first load returns, the phone has nothing yet
- The phone cannot writeSo a half-restored device can never push its empty pack over your real one
- It keeps tryingFast a few times, then every minute. Retry only skips the wait
Referral codes
You used a friend’s code and no Pass arrived
What’s happening. When Dogoos is installed from a friend’s link, the code travels attached to the install and the app reads it once, on the very first run, so the 7-day Tracker Pass lands without anyone typing anything. That read has plenty of ways to come back empty: a copy of the app that didn’t come from the Play Store carries no referrer at all, a first launch with no signal has nothing to claim against, and a parameter dropped somewhere in the middle looks identical to one that was never there. None of those is allowed to interrupt startup or throw an error at you — which is precisely why a missing Pass is silent. After a few failed goes the app stops chasing the code it was holding.
What to do. Type it in. Settings → Support → “Tell a friend — get a free month” → “Have a friend’s code?”. The DOGOOS- prefix is fixed chrome, so you only type the part after it, and pasting a whole shared code strips the prefix for you. It goes to the same server the automatic claim does, and lands the same 7-day Tracker Pass.
What the reward actually is. Your friend gets a 7-day Tracker Pass the moment their code goes through. You get a 30-day Tracker Pass only when that friend subscribes — up to three a year. The app’s own settings row says “get a free month”, and the month is real; the condition attached to it is the bit worth knowing before you count on it.
In the browser
A button in the browser says it’s on mobile
The web app opens your account on any screen, and four things stop at a wall with a title on it instead of a control that would fail: “Live reads need the Dogoos app”, “Manage plans in the Dogoos app”, “Push settings are on mobile” and “Doggy Dash is on mobile”. Adding or replacing a dog’s photo gets its own sheet, “Dog photos are on mobile”, which also tells you the useful half: photos you’ve already added still appear and download from that page. The wall is deliberate. Camera reads and keepsake capture are, in the app’s own words, protected mobile features, and a Google Play purchase belongs to the Android app — so Dogoos names the place the thing lives instead of handing you a control that would break halfway.
Two more browser symptoms that aren’t faults. Nothing arrives as a notification on the web, health reminders included — browser notifications aren’t enabled in this first web release, the phone app is what rings, and the journal entry is there either way. And your account loads from the network every time: there’s no offline copy of your reads to open on a train. Add the web app to a home screen if you like the icon — it’s built to open in its own window — but the data still comes down the wire. What does open on a laptop is the part you’d want on a laptop: the whole read history, keepsakes, the journal, the vet PDF, Rex. The web app page lists every line of it, both columns.
The wall is about the browser, not the screen. Opening app.dogoos.com in your phone’s browser hits exactly the same four walls as a desktop does. It isn’t reading your screen size and deciding you’re not serious — those features live in the installed app.
Still stuck
What to put in the email
Every route into Dogoos is an email to a person. No chat widget, no phone line, no ticket number, nothing in between: support@dogoos.com for accounts, data, privacy requests, anything about a plan and anything that looks like a bug, and hello@dogoos.com for Kennel and professional plans, press and partnerships. Both are read by a person. The app’s own help screen puts the turnaround this way: “Our team usually replies within a day.”
The single most useful thing you can send is the exact sentence you saw. The app’s messages are written to be specific — “That code wasn’t found” and “You’ve already used a code” are two entirely different problems with two different fixes — so the wording tells us which branch you hit without a round trip. After that: which phone, whether it was the app or the browser, and roughly when. Dog photos are welcome and genuinely read.
Questions, answered
The ones that arrive at the worst moment
I’ve signed in on a second phone. Can it overwrite the first one?
No, and quite a lot of the app is built around making sure of it. A device that hasn’t finished loading your account can’t write to it at all, a fresh device is only allowed to seed an account that doesn’t exist yet, and the things you accumulate — breed checks, training, quiz stats, unlocked themes — merge rather than replace, so a partial snapshot can’t blank what the other phone knows. Deletions you make on purpose are the exception that travels: remove a dog and it leaves the cloud immediately, and the other phone catches up the next time it loads. In a household it’s live on everyone’s phone, because a shared pack is a listener rather than a sync.
Why does my plan look free on a new phone?
Because your plan, bones and streak are display-only until the account load lands — the app can’t set your own tier even if it wanted to, since that lives on the server and the rules reject a client trying to write it. A brief “free” on a new phone is cosmetic, not loss. If it’s still wrong after the banner has gone and you have subscribed, open Plans in the phone app and use “Already subscribed? Restore” at the bottom; the browser can’t do it, because Play purchases stay in the Android app. Plans and billing covers the rest of that path.
The app says I’ve already used a code, and I haven’t.
An account gets one code in its life, gift or referral, whichever landed first — so a gift code redeemed months ago closes the door on a friend’s referral code today. Worth checking before you assume the code is dead: a subscriber is also refused, with “You’re already subscribed — a Pass can’t top that up”, because a Tracker Pass can never sit on top of a plan that already outranks it.
Retry isn’t doing anything.
Retry resets the backoff and asks again straight away — it skips the wait, it doesn’t change the answer. If the connection is still the thing refusing, you get the same refusal a few seconds sooner. Where it earns its keep is the moment right after you’ve fixed the connection, when the app would otherwise sit out the rest of the current gap before trying again. Leaving the app open works too: the retry keeps coming on its own, and it never gives up while the app is in front of you.
Can you fix it from your end?
Some of it. Support can tell you what a message means, which part of the app owns the problem, and act on a formal data request under the privacy policy. What nobody at Dogoos can do is cancel a Google Play subscription for you — that is between you and Google, by design, and the app opens the exact Play screen for you instead. Erasing your account is likewise yours to do, from the app, and the page about it says exactly what goes.
Something about my dog’s health looks wrong in the journal.
Fix the entry — the journal records what you put into it and nothing else. Dogoos records a dose, it never calculates one, and no part of the app will tell you what a symptom means. If what you’re looking at is worrying rather than mistyped, that conversation belongs with a qualified vet, and the Health Hub exists to hand you the notes to walk in with.
Most of it is still trying.
The rest is one email.
Open the web app 🦴
Free to use · Live camera reads are on the phone app