Help & Support

No. You can browse shops, search, and save favourites as a guest. Guest saves are stored on your device and expire after 7 days — make an account and they carry over permanently.

Usually one of three things:

• Location is off. Bobao needs location permission, or a city set manually, to know where "near me" is.
• You're outside our coverage. Shop data is strongest in US metro areas.
• Nothing nearby is listed yet. Try widening the search radius, or search a city name directly.

Search matches shop names, drinks, toppings and neighbourhoods, and it tolerates typos — "brwon sugar" still finds brown sugar. It's ordinary text matching rather than an AI assistant, so short, concrete words work better than a full sentence. Use the filters for anything more specific.

Tap the bookmark icon on any shop to save it; saved shops appear in your My Boba tab. From there you can sort them into collections — your own groups, like "Date night" or "Study spots". Collections need an account, because they sync to it rather than living on one device.

A shop's rating is the average of reviews written on Bobao, and nothing else — we don't import star ratings from Google, Yelp or anywhere else. A shop nobody has reviewed here shows no rating at all rather than a zero, so a blank rating means "no reviews yet", not "rated badly".

Yes. Open the shop, find your own review, and use the menu on it to edit or remove it. Deleting a review takes it out of that shop's rating straight away.

Check in at the shop. Depending on how the shop is set up, that's a staff PIN, scanning a QR code, or confirming your location while you're there. Fill a card and you can claim the reward the shop offers — the shop sets that itself, and it can be a coupon, a free topping, merch or a drink, so a filled card is not a free drink unless that shop said so.

No. Stamps are saved to your account, so signing in on a new device brings them with you. If they're missing, sign out and back in first; if they still don't appear, email us with your account email and roughly when you earned them.

Check you're signed in and inside the shop, then try again. If the shop uses a staff PIN, it changes regularly — ask staff for the current one rather than reusing an old one. If it still fails, email us the shop name and the time you tried.

Checking in at shops earns the most, and writing reviews, finishing quests and keeping a daily streak going all add to it. Points only ever go up — nothing you do spends them.

A streak counts the days in a row you check in, and keeping one going earns a bonus on top of your normal points. Missing a day resets the streak to zero; it doesn't take away points you've already earned.

Open the shop and suggest a correction. Edits are reviewed — small cosmetic fixes can apply once enough people agree, while changes to an address, name, phone number or hours always get a human check before they go live.

Email us the shop's name and address and we'll look into it. Shop data comes from mapping providers as well as our own records, so a very new shop can take a while to appear.

Find your shop in the app and choose Claim this shop. We email a verification code to the shop's listed contact address to confirm the shop is yours. Once verified, you can manage hours, menu, photos, deals and respond to reviews.

Codes expire and there's a limit on attempts — if you run out, start a new claim rather than retrying the old code.

Every ad is reviewed by a person before it runs. We aim to review within 2 weeks, and you'll be notified once it's approved. Ads don't publish automatically.

In the app: Account → Settings → Privacy → Delete account. Or see the account deletion page, which also covers what's deleted, what's kept, and how to request it if you can't reach the app.

We don't sell it, and we don't use tracking pixels or ad networks. Guest activity stays on your device and never reaches our servers. The Privacy Policy has the full detail, including the providers we share data with and why.

Use the report option on the item itself. Reports go to our moderation queue and are reviewed by a person within 2 weeks. If something needs urgent attention — anything involving a minor's safety, threats, or personal information — email us directly and say it's urgent, and we'll look at it straight away.

Use the password reset link on the sign-in screen. If the reset email doesn't arrive, check spam, then email us from the address on the account. We can't reset a password for an address we can't verify is yours.

Account → Settings → Edit Account. You can change your display name, your username and your avatar there, as often as you like.

Account → Settings → Notifications. It's a single on-or-off switch rather than a list of categories, and Bobao doesn't send email newsletters or digests. Your phone or browser has its own notification permission too, so both need to be on.

Your exact coordinates are never shown to other people. Location is used to work out which shops are near you, and to verify a check-in when you use the location method — other users only ever see an approximate distance. You can switch Location Services off in Settings → Privacy; search and check-in by PIN or QR still work without it.

Settings → Privacy has four switches: Analytics & Insights, Location Services, Buzz Features, and Marketing & Promos. You can change any of them at any time, and the same screen lets you download a copy of your data or delete your account.

Account visibility is set separately, under Account → Edit Account: switch on Private Account and only people you've accepted as friends can see your account. You can also block someone, which hides you from each other both ways. There are no separate controls for your saved shops or friend list on their own.

In the app: Account → Help & Feedback → Share Feedback. Pick a category, describe it, and optionally rate the app. It reaches our team by email and a person reads every one.

We can only write back if you fill in the optional email field, so leave it if you want an answer. The form takes text only — if you have a screenshot, email it to getbobao@gmail.com instead.