The app showed the subscription screen after a restart — am I locked out?

The app re-checks your subscription with the store from time to time, including after a cold start. The design principle is fail-open: a paying builder must never be locked out of evidence capture by a signal blip, a store outage, or a phone restart. Here is exactly how that works and what to do when the subscription screen appears anyway.

The grace windows, precisely

• After any successful subscription check, you have 24 hours of access with no further check needed — offline or online. That window survives killing and restarting the app, so a cold start in a no-signal spot on site does not lock you out.
• Once 24 hours pass without a successful check, offline or with the store unreachable, the subscription screen shows until a check can complete. This ceiling exists so a genuinely cancelled subscription cannot run forever by staying offline; it is generous enough that no normal working pattern hits it.
• A transient error during the check (store unreachable, flaky connection) is treated like being offline — you stay in, within the grace window. Only a definite "no active subscription" answer, or an expired grace window, shows the subscription screen.

If the subscription screen appears

1. Get signal and reopen the app. If the cause was a failed check near the end of a grace window, the next successful check clears it — this fixes most cases in under a minute.
2. Tap Restore Purchases on the screen. This re-attaches the store purchase directly; see restore-purchases for the full steps, including making sure you are on the right Apple ID or Google account.
3. Check the subscription's real state in the store. A renewal payment that failed (expired card, bank decline) pauses the subscription on the store side while you still think of yourself as subscribed:

• iPhone: Settings → your name → Subscriptions → Buildsnapper.
• Android: Play Store → profile picture → Payments and subscriptions → Subscriptions. Fixing the payment method there restores things without touching the app.

If none of that explains it

An active, paid subscription plus a working connection plus a subscription screen is a defect on our side, and we treat a builder blocked on site as urgent. Contact support with which phone you are on, the app version, and what the screen shows — choosing "Evidence at risk on site" if you are standing on a plot with photos to take. Whatever went wrong, your photos are untouched by any of this: the subscription gate controls access to the app, never the evidence stored on the device.