The document that admits what it missed

A record with a quiet hole in it is worse than no record at all, because nobody reading it knows the hole is there.

When you film a conversation and scroll too quickly, the app sometimes cannot be certain it saw everything between one screen and the next. The screens do not quite overlap. Something may have gone past in between.

There are two things a piece of software can do at that moment, and the choice says everything about what it is for.

What most software does

It closes the gap. Joins what it has, produces a document that reads perfectly, and says nothing. The output is tidy. The customer is happy. Nobody ever finds out.

And if a message did go past in that gap, the document is now a lie with a timestamp on it. Somebody might rely on it in a dispute, in front of a solicitor, in front of a tribunal. It looks complete. It reads complete. It is not complete, and there is nothing in it that would ever tell you.

What ours does

It stops and says so, at the exact spot, in the middle of the transcript:

Possible gap in the recording. Content may have scrolled past here without being captured. If this section matters, re-record it scrolling slowly.

The front page of the document also gives a count, or says "None detected" when there were none — so the absence of gaps is itself stated, rather than assumed from silence.

It runs deeper than gap markers

Once you accept that rule, it decides a surprising number of other things.

Nothing is ever thrown away. The app makes judgements constantly — is this a message, or the time, or a button, or writing on a photograph somebody shared? It gets some of them wrong. So everything it decided was not a message is listed at the back of the document. If it judged wrongly, that thing is in the wrong section. It is never gone. A misjudgement costs you a footnote instead of a message.

It never invents a time. iOS hides the time on each message until you swipe for it. If you did not swipe, we do not know when a message was sent, and the document says so rather than estimating from the date heading. An invented timestamp on an evidence document is not a convenience, it is a fabrication.

The numbers add up. The cover sheet states how many readings were taken off your screen, how many were printed as messages, and how many were set aside. You can add them up and check. We run that check ourselves on every build, because a document that accounts for its own contents is worth more than one that asks to be trusted.

The uncomfortable part

Being honest about uncertainty means our documents occasionally look worse than a competitor's. Theirs is clean. Ours has a marked gap in it and a list at the back.

We have thought about that a lot, and keep landing in the same place. If you are handing this to somebody who matters, you need to know what it does not cover. A document that hides its own weak point is not doing you a favour — it is doing itself one.

The gap marker is not a defect we failed to remove. It is the feature.