4a — Support

4a is a daily podcast picker: four topic queues a day, one of them deliberately unlike the others. This page is how you get help with it.

help@jwlabs.ai is the address. There is no ticket system and no robot in front of it: what you send is read, and the answer comes from somebody who can change the code.

Before you write

Two pages answer most of what arrives:

• Questions — the ones people actually ask.
• Getting started — including the things that look like bugs and are not, which is a genuinely useful list.

What makes a report easy to act on

• What you were doing, and what happened instead. The second half is the one people leave out.
• The episode it happened on, if it was a specific one.
• Which browser and which device. The web app is the only released build — see availability below.
• For anything to do with audio: the playback diagnostics record. See the next section. It is the difference between "we will look into it" and an actual fix.

You do not need to be technical, and you do not need to have narrowed it down. "It stopped when I plugged in headphones in the car" is a good report.

Playback diagnostics

Open the menu (☰) and choose Playback diagnostics. Copy it, and paste it into your email.

It records what the player measured on your device: how long each load took, where playback stopped, gaps at the seams of an assembled run, and any control press that did not do what it should. It holds no audio, no episode addresses and no account identifier.

It is stored on your device only and is never sent anywhere — it reaches us only if you copy it into an email yourself. There is a control to clear it.

It exists because two playback faults were once reported from a car with no measurements attached, and there was nothing to diagnose them with.

Deleting your data

Open the menu (☰) and choose Delete my data. The sheet lists what the deletion covers, and you confirm by typing DELETE, so one stray tap cannot trigger it. There is also a clear this device only option.

You do not need to email anyone, and emailing will not be faster — the control reaches things an email cannot, including both storage layers on your device.

What 4a knows about you is the plain-language version, including the three things no deletion can reach and why. §7 of the privacy policy is the exact one.

Telling us a pick was wrong

The most useful thing you can send us, and the only signal that carries why rather than just that.

Where 4a offers thumbs, a thumbs-down opens a short list of specific reasons — not into this topic, just not this show, heard this already, too surface-level, too in-the-weeds, bad audio quality, and others — plus a free-text note. A thumbs-up commits immediately, because an up-vote has nothing to explain.

Those live on the segments of an assembled run, and none is published yet, so for today's daily cards the route is an email. One line is enough: which card, and what was wrong with it.

If you do type a note in the app, it is sent to us and stored, so do not put anything in it you would not want kept.

Reporting something more serious

A security problem — the security page says what to include, what is in scope, and what we can and cannot promise.

Something unusable with assistive technology — the accessibility page is honest about what has and has not been tested, and a report is worth more to us than most feature requests.

You are a podcaster — there is a page for you, including how to have your show removed. The answer is yes.

Availability

The web app is the shipping version. It works on a phone, needs no signup, and can be added to a home screen.

Native iOS and Android shells are built from the same code. The iOS build has run on the simulator; the Android build has been compiled. Neither is in a store, and there is no date. We do not publish dates.

What is built and what is not is the whole inventory, including the things that are designed and not built.

What happens to your report

There is no service-level agreement and we are not going to invent one. What we will do: read it, tell you whether we can reproduce it, and tell you what we intend to do about it. If we decide not to fix something, we will say so rather than going quiet.

It is early software

4a is new, 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.