My pins are missing after updating Pin Drop

Your pins are still there

If you have opened Pin Drop after an update and your pins are not on the map, the most likely explanation is a sync issue rather than anything being deleted. Pins are stored in the cloud against your account. An update to the app does not touch your data. Nothing is removed when you install a new version.

This has caught a number of people out after the v6 update in particular. The app looks different, the layout has changed and if pins do not appear immediately it is easy to assume the worst. In almost every case the pins are still there and a simple refresh is all it takes to bring them back.

How to get your pins back

The quickest fix is a manual refresh. On the map screen, pull down to trigger a sync. This forces the app to re-fetch your data from the server and in most cases your pins will reappear within a few seconds.

If that does not work, try signing out and back in. Go to your profile settings, sign out completely, then sign back in using your email address. A fresh login re-establishes the connection between the app and your account and tends to resolve any lingering sync issues that a simple refresh does not catch.

Make sure you are connected to the internet when you do this. Pin Drop needs a live connection to sync your data from the server to your device.

If your pins are still not showing

A small number of users have reported that the steps above did not fully resolve the issue after the v6 update. In these cases the pins exist on the server but something is preventing them from loading correctly on the device.

If you have tried a pull-to-refresh and a fresh sign in and your pins are still not appearing, get in touch with us at hello@pindropapp.com. Include the email address on your account and a brief description of what you are seeing. We can check the account directly and where needed send a debug build that can recover the data.

Your pins are not gone. We have not seen a case where an update permanently removed a user's data and we do not expect to. If something looks wrong we want to hear about it so we can sort it out.

Why this happens after an update

When a major version of Pin Drop is installed, the app goes through a setup process that includes re-establishing its connection to your account on the new infrastructure. During this process there is a window where the local app has not yet synced your data from the server. If you open the map before that sync completes, the map can look empty.

This is a known side effect of how the v6 architecture works and is something we are working to make less jarring. The fix going forward is to make the loading state clearer so it is obvious the app is fetching your data rather than appearing blank. In the meantime, a pull-to-refresh after opening the app for the first time on a new version is a good habit to get into.