4a — questions
The ones people actually ask. If yours is not here, ask at help@jwlabs.ai.
For getting help with a specific problem, the support page says what to include so it can be acted on.
Using it
Do I need an account?
No. There is no signup, no password, no email address and no profile. The app creates an anonymous account for itself — an opaque identifier with no name attached — and that is the whole of it. What 4a knows about you is the detail.
Is it free? Is there a paid tier?
It is free, there is nothing to buy, there is no subscription and there is no in-app purchase. There is also no advertising in it. We are not going to pretend that is a permanent business model — but there is no upsell hiding behind anything, and if that changes it will be said plainly rather than discovered.
Why only four?
Because the problem is not a shortage of podcasts. A ranked list of two hundred is the same problem you already had, sorted. Four is small enough to actually read and large enough that one of them is usually right.
Can I change it to five? Or ten?
No, and that is a decision rather than a missing setting. "How many recommendations would you like" is a question nobody has a good answer to.
Why is one card labelled Stretch?
Because it is deliberately outside your usual subjects, and telling you is more respectful than sneaking it in. It also ignores your skip rate for the area it is exploring, so it does not quietly give up and hand you the same three shows forever. More on that.
A pick was wrong for me. Can I say so?
Yes, and it is the most useful thing you can do. Where 4a offers thumbs, a thumbs-down opens a short list of specific reasons — not into this topic, just not this show, too surface-level, too in-the-weeds, and others — plus a free note. The reasons are specific because "not for me" on its own tells a learning system almost nothing.
For today's daily cards the fastest route is an email.
How long before the picks get good?
The three non-Stretch queues start looking like yours after about a week of ordinary use. 4a never asks you to describe yourself, so on day one it is working from very little. Getting started has the honest version, including the three things that speed it up.
Can I just ask for what I want?
Yes. There is a build me a playlist field under the four cards. Type what you want in your own words. If it finds too little it says the result is thin rather than padding it, and if it finds nothing it suggests adjacent subjects that are not empty.
Does 4a play the audio itself?
By default it hands an episode off to whichever podcast app you prefer, and that is the route from the daily cards. 4a also has its own player, used for assembled runs of segments, which streams straight from each publisher's servers.
Either way 4a never rehosts or proxies audio — the bytes come from the publisher, not from us.
Does it work offline?
The app and its library listing are cached, so 4a opens and renders in a dead zone. Audio is never cached, so playing something needs a connection.
Can I put it on my home screen?
Yes, on iPhone, Android and desktop, and it behaves like an app once it is there. The steps for each.
What is family mode?
A switch that hides episodes rated explicit — and also hides the whole comedy category, because older comedy items in the library predate per-episode ratings. That second half is deliberately blunt, and we explain why rather than leaving you to discover it.
The name
Why does the web address say "foray"?
The app used to be called Foray. Renaming the address and the on-device storage would break saved links and orphan data already sitting on people's devices, so they keep the old name.
And a "foray" is also a thing in the app?
Yes, confusingly, and it is the older meaning: a foray is one assembled run of segments cut from several episodes and played as one sequence. The app is 4a; a foray is a thing it makes. None is published yet, so you will not meet one today.
Privacy
Is there advertising in 4a?
There is no ad code, no ad identifier and no advertising SDK in the app. That is a statement about our code, and not a claim that nobody observes your playback — publishers commonly put measurement and attribution services in front of their own audio files, and your device follows those redirects when it plays. The honest version.
What do you collect?
Five kinds of event, against an anonymous identifier holding no name, email or phone number, plus any note you choose to type into a thumbs-down. Everything else — interests, positions, history, playlists, settings — stays on your device. Plain language, exact document.
Do you sell my data?
No. There is no advertising business here to sell it to, and there is no personally identifying data to sell in the first place.
How do I delete everything?
Menu (☰) → Delete my data, and type DELETE to confirm. It covers both storage layers on your device and your rows on our server, and it does the server first so it cannot report success for something it did not do. Including the three things no deletion can reach.
Why is there no data-retention period?
Because no deletion job exists yet, and a period we do not enforce would be a false statement in a document store reviewers read. We would rather record the silence.
Availability
When are the iOS and Android apps out?
No date. Shells for both are built from the same code as the web app; the iOS build has run on the simulator and the Android build has been compiled. Neither is in a store. The web app is the shipping version today and works on a phone.
We do not publish dates. A missed date on a company website is a worse signal than an absent one.
Is it available in my country?
The web app is a web address, so it opens anywhere with a browser. The library is English-language today, so how useful it is depends on that rather than on where you are.
Is any of this final?
No. 4a is early, the library changes, and features move. If something reads as broken it may well be, and help@jwlabs.ai is the way to tell us.
Podcasters
My show is in your library. What does that mean?
It means 4a may recommend it, and that when someone plays it they fetch it from your servers exactly as any podcast app does. We never rehost, re-encode or modify your audio, and we never strip your advertising. The whole answer, including how to be removed.