VolcanoDiver

01Write to us

One address, and a person on the other end of it.

02With your report

A problem is far easier to chase when the mail carries the surroundings of it:

• the iPhone model, and the iOS version under Settings → General → About;
• which control scheme you dive with — tilt, touch drag or screen halves;
• where it happened: the splash, the onboarding, a dive in progress, the log, the hangar;
• what you saw against what you expected;
• a screen recording if the thing moves, a screenshot if it does not.

If the app closes by itself, note whether it does so on every launch or only sometimes. The two have different causes and the answer narrows the search immediately.

03The descent

Five things make up a run.

1. The probe falls on its own. You steer it sideways to thread the gaps — by tilting the phone, by dragging a finger, or by holding a side of the screen, whichever you picked in the settings.
2. The hull heats up: from the depth, from the speed, from flying close to a glowing wall, and sharply from magma falls and scraped ledges. Steam vents cool it down.
3. The brake shield is held, not tapped. It cuts the fall to about a third of its speed and sheds heat while it is out.
4. Lava climbs the tube behind you. Brake for too long and it arrives; that ends the run just as surely as the gauge reaching 100 per cent.
5. Not braking pays: the risk multiplier gains a step every five seconds without the shield, up to ×5, and drops to nothing the moment you open it.

The score is the depth in metres, plus a fixed bonus for each rock sample collected on the way down. Nothing else counts towards it.

04Questions

04.1The gauge hits 100 per cent and the run stops. Is that a bug?

No, that is the end condition. The hull has no lives — it has a temperature, and at 100 per cent it is gone. The screen edges start warming at 80 per cent, which is the warning to find a steam vent or hold the shield.

04.2Tilting does nothing.

The tilt reader works off the accelerometer, so it wants a real device — on a simulator there is nothing to read. If the phone is flat on a table, the neutral point sits where the phone is; lift it to a normal reading angle before the dive. The response can be made sharper or gentler with Tilt sensitivity in the settings, and if tilting is not for you at all, Control scheme offers touch drag and screen halves instead.

04.3Why do the zones repeat?

The tube is endless and is assembled in bands of 500 metres. The names cycle through Basalt, Obsidian and the magma chamber, but each band is faster, hotter and narrower than the one above it, with fewer steam vents to cool in. Deep Basalt and shallow Basalt share a name and nothing else.

04.4How are the other hulls opened?

By depth reached, in the hangar: MK-II Ember at 800 m, MK-III Obsidian at 1800 m, MK-IV Cyanide at 3500 m, MK-V Ashfall at 4500 m, MK-VI Pyroclast at 6000 m. They are paint, not equipment — every hull falls, heats and brakes identically, so a record always says something about the dive and never about the livery.

04.5A run ended with "score not stored".

That is the app telling the truth: the dive log could not be written to the phone, so the run was not filed. The result stays on screen with a retry button, and the usual cause is a device with no free space left. Clear some and retry before leaving the screen — once you dive again, an unfiled run is gone.

04.6What does the app want with my photos?

Two separate things, each asked for at the moment it happens. Choosing a picture for the operator's avatar opens the system picker, and only the picture you pick is read. Saving the dive card from the share sheet writes one image to your library. Decline either and the rest of the app is unaffected — the avatar simply stays one of the three chevron liveries.

04.7There was a prompt about tracking on first launch.

That is the system's own tracking prompt. The descent does not consult the answer: no depth, no unlock and no setting depends on it. The choice can be revisited in iOS Settings → Privacy & Security → Tracking.

04.8Can the shaking and the sound be turned down?

Yes, three switches in the settings: Sound, Haptics on heat spikes, and Reduce screen shake for when the camera kick during magma falls is too much. Each is independent of the others.

04.9The app is in the wrong language.

Pick one in Settings → Language; Device language hands the choice back to the phone. The app's own text changes straight away. The system's permission dialogs are not ours to translate on the spot — they follow from the next launch.

04.10Is there anything to buy?

Nothing at all. No purchases, no subscription, no currency, no way to shorten a dive with money. Depth is the only thing that opens anything.

05Data

There is no account to create and no login to keep. The things the app remembers sit on the phone itself, in the app's own storage:

Reset local records in the settings erases all four in one go, and the confirmation says as much before it does. Deleting the app does the same thing and leaves nothing behind. Since none of it leaves the device, none of it can be restored by us or moved to a new phone.

What the app does send — identifiers, analytics, crash and attribution data — and how long it is kept are described in the privacy policy. Access and deletion requests go to the address in section 01; the policy states the terms they are handled on.

06Requirements