Your chore history stays on your devices
The NestBoard team · 2026-07-28
Where the checkmarks live
When someone marks a chore complete in NestBoard, that record stays on the device where it happened. We don't automatically sync completed chore logs to our servers or push them to every other tablet and phone in your household.
The chore template syncs everywhere—the task name, who's assigned, the rotation schedule, all of that. But the history of who did what and when? That lives locally.
This means the leaderboard on your kitchen tablet might show different totals than the one on your phone. If you've been checking off chores on the tablet all week, your phone won't know about those completions unless you open NestBoard there too.
Why we made this choice
Chore history can accumulate quickly. If you have four people rotating through eight tasks over six months, you're looking at hundreds or thousands of completion records. Syncing all of that across devices in real time creates a lot of chatter—background data transfers, battery drain, potential conflicts when two people mark the same task done at slightly different times.
We decided the juice wasn't worth the squeeze. The point of the leaderboard is friendly accountability in the moment, not a forensic audit trail. The person standing in the kitchen sees who's pulled their weight this week. That's usually enough.
If you want a shared single source of truth, designate one device as the household hub. We built NestBoard around the kitchen tablet for exactly this reason.
What happens when you switch devices
If you replace your kitchen tablet or reset a phone, the chore history on that device disappears. The templates will sync back from the cloud—your recurring tasks, rotations, and assignments all reappear—but past completions don't.
This isn't a bug. It's a trade-off we made to keep the app lightweight and your data local by default.
If chore history is important to you—say, you're tracking allowance based on task counts—take a screenshot of the leaderboard before you switch. Or check the totals on another device in your household that's been running NestBoard in parallel.
The broader pattern
This is the same philosophy behind how we handle a lot of features. Medication logs stay local. Pantry scans stay local. Robin conversations stay local unless you explicitly share them.
We sync the scaffolding—your calendar, your recipes, your task templates—but the day-to-day ephemera lives close to you. It's faster, it's private, and it respects the fact that not everything needs to be everywhere all the time.