How to get your data out of an app before you're locked in

A few years ago I kept a habit tracker I was genuinely fond of. Colour-coded, nearly two years of little filled-in squares, the sort of thing you get quietly attached to. Then the developer stopped updating it, a phone update broke it, and that was that. Two years of data gone, because there was no way to get any of it back out. That is the moment I started asking a different question about every app I let into my life. Not just whether it is any good, but whether I can get my data out of an app later if I ever want to.

I build apps for a living, on my own, and export is one of the few things I refuse to cut. So I have opinions about this from both sides: as someone who has been burned as a user, and as the person who has to decide whether to bother building the export in the first place. Most people never check this until the day they need it, which is the worst possible day to find out the answer is no.

Why "can I leave?" is the question most privacy advice skips

When people talk about app privacy they usually mean tracking. Who is watching, which ads follow you around, what the company knows. That matters. But there is a quieter risk that gets almost no attention, and it is whether you can walk away with your own stuff when you have had enough. Your photos, your notes, your years of entries. If the answer is no, you do not really own any of it. You are renting it back from whoever holds the database.

There is a simple incentive underneath this. An app you can leave has to keep earning you, because you can always take your data and go. The one you cannot leave does not, because it is holding your history and it knows it. So the ability to export does more than save you some hassle. It keeps the relationship honest, and it is usually the first sign of whether a developer is building for you or just trying to keep you.

An app worth trusting is one you could walk away from tomorrow, data and all.

What being able to export your data actually looks like

Here is where it gets slippery, because being able to get your data out of an app only counts if the export is actually usable. Plenty of apps have an export button that does almost nothing. A PDF of your data laid out like a receipt is not really an export. Neither is a screenshot, or a file only that same app can open again. A real export is your data in a form something else can read, so you could move to a different tool tomorrow without retyping your life. A few things I look for:

• An open format. CSV for anything list-shaped, JSON or plain text or Markdown for the rest. If a spreadsheet or another app can open it, that is a good sign.
• All of it, not the leftovers. The export should carry the actual content, not just titles and dates whilst the substance stays locked inside.
• A file you actually receive. Downloaded to your device or emailed to you in one go, rather than a support ticket and a two-week wait.
• No hoops. If exporting means upgrading to a paid tier or begging over email, that already tells you how they think about your data.

How to check an app lets you leave before you commit

The good news is you can work most of this out in about ten minutes, before you have poured a year of anything into it. I do a quick version of this now for anything I plan to lean on, and it is the fastest way to tell whether you will be able to get your data out of an app when it matters.

• Dig through the settings for an Export or Download option. If it is buried or missing, that is already an answer.
• Search the app's reviews for the word export. People who have tried to leave are blunt in a way the marketing never is.
• Open the privacy policy and search for delete and your data. Look for whether you can remove your account and take a copy with you, in plain words.
• Do a test export on day one, while it is still cheap to walk away. Actually open the file and see if it contains what you think it does.

That last one is the whole game. An export button that produces an empty or unreadable file is worse than none at all, because it looks like a promise and keeps looking like one right up until the morning you rely on it. Ten minutes early beats two years lost later.

Why apps make leaving hard, and why it is usually not malice

It would be easy to read all this as tech companies being sinister, and sometimes it is. But most of the time lock-in is just incentives and neglect. A subscription business quietly benefits from you not being able to leave, so a proper export never climbs the priority list. Other apps trap your data by accident, because building a good export is real work that no user asks for until the day they are furious about it. Nobody writes a glowing review because the export worked.

I say that with some sympathy, because I have felt the pull. Export is effort that mostly helps the user who is leaving, which is a strange thing to spend your limited hours building. But that is exactly why doing it anyway says something. It is a small, unglamorous signal that the developer would rather you stayed by choice than by being stuck.

How I handle this in my own apps

I will be straight about my own side so this does not read as a lecture with the hard part left out. With Luna Journal, the voice journal I build, your entries live on your device and you can export them to Notion or a CSV whenever you like, with no account to sign up for in the first place. The test I set myself is simple. Could someone take everything they have written and walk away without me, and be completely fine. If the answer is ever no, I have built the wrong thing.

That is the same question I am suggesting you ask of everything else, mine included. Go and check mine too. I would rather you kept using Luna because leaving is easy and you choose to stay, than because you are trapped. Those are very different reasons, and only one of them holds up over time.

You do not need to abandon every app that fails this test. I still use a few that would trap my data tomorrow, because they are worth it for now and I went in with my eyes open. The point is simpler than that. Know which apps you could actually leave and which you could not, and make that a real choice instead of something you find out the hard way, two years in, when an update quietly breaks the one that was holding everything.

If you take one thing from this, run the ten-minute check on one app you rely on this week. Just one. Find the export, open the file, see if your life is really in there. Thanks for reading. Benjamin

Built for this

Luna Journal

A journal that fits into your day. You speak, and Luna turns it into entries you can read back and reflect on. Organised with AI, and stored on your phone rather than on my servers.

Benjamin

Founder & sole developer, Novaire Digital