Questions, bugs, or ideas: nofret.app@gmail.com. It's a one-person app, so you'll get a reply from an actual human — usually within two or three days.
If you're reporting a bug, it helps enormously to include your iPhone model, your iOS version, and what you were doing when it happened. Nofret has no analytics, so your description is genuinely the only information I get.
Open the Study page first. It's the whole neck with every note written on it, untimed and unscored, and it's free — there's nothing to get wrong and nothing counting. Nofret will suggest it to you anyway: if you're on stage one and haven't played a drill yet, the card at the top of the Practice tab offers the Study page first, then your first Note ID drill once you're ready.
Three things worth knowing while you're looking at it, which the Study page also tells you:
Then play a Note ID drill. Stage one is the six open strings and nothing else, so the first drill is six answers' worth of material, not the whole neck. The card at the top of the Practice tab tells you what to play next every day after that — which drill, in which direction, and why.
One other thing to settle early: whether you'd rather drill with the phone upright or sideways. Sideways shows about twice as much neck. The switch is on the Practice tab above the drills, and in Settings › Board.
Nofret watches for this and will say so. If five graded drills in a row go by without a single new position becoming automatic, the card at the top of the Practice tab switches to the Weak Spots drill and tells you how many positions are holding you back — it's the positions you're slowest or least accurate on, and nothing else. Above it you'll get a Study your weak spots button, which opens the Study page narrowed to exactly those positions. Looking at the ones that keep catching you out is often faster than drilling them again.
The same card offers the New String drill when a stage has just added one, so the new string gets drilled on its own before it's mixed in with everything you already know. Both of those drills are part of Pro, so on the two free stages the card sticks to the scored ones — and the Study page is still there either way.
If it's one skill that's stuck rather than the stage, check which. The Progress tab has a Naming/Finding toggle, and the two really are separate skills — being fast at naming a position doesn't make you fast at finding one. A stage needs both.
And if it's speed specifically, the tip above is usually the answer: you're probably still counting up from an anchor rather than knowing the position outright. Slowing down to answer without calculating is what eventually makes it fast.
Moving up takes three things at once: 90% accuracy, 85% of the stage answered at speed, and both on two separate days. You also have to meet them in both directions — naming notes and finding them. The second day is deliberate: a night's sleep is part of how the previous stage sticks.
If you'd rather not wait, Settings › Progress bypass › Allow same-day promotion removes the cross-day requirement. That section is labeled "not recommended" for the reason above, but it's your app and your call.
No. Nothing in Nofret is on a clock — no mode has a countdown, and you're never marked wrong for taking your time. A session is a fixed number of questions and ends when you've answered them.
Nofret does measure how long you take, because fast recall is the skill it's training, but measuring is not the same as pressuring. If a session still feels like too much, the four untracked drills — Free Practice, New String, Weak Spots and Find Them All — don't count toward stage progression at all. They're for exploring the neck without anything at stake.
It measures how long you take to tap or say a note you've already been given — pure reaction and movement, with no thinking involved. That figure is then subtracted from every drill answer, so what Nofret reports is how long you took to identify the note, not how fast your thumb is. It's why the times are comparable between a phone in your hand and a phone on a table.
You can see and reset each measurement in Settings › Response time. Resetting one just means the quick check runs again before your next drill that needs it.
No. The placement test at first launch should put you well up the ladder. If it got it wrong, Settings › Progress bypass › Change stage lets you go anywhere.
Start with the ordinary things: use it somewhere quiet, and say the note deliberately rather than quickly. Recognition is noticeably better on iOS 26 and later, and if it keeps mishearing you, tapping is just as good — nothing is scored differently.
Plain note letters are usually handled better than notes with a sharp or a flat, so this may not come up until a later stage. When it does, the word "sharp" is the specific troublemaker: "D sharp" and "G sharp" are both commonly heard as "T-shirt", and because either one could have produced that, Nofret offers you both and lets you tap the one you meant rather than guessing at it. If you keep hitting that, try saying the flat name instead — "E flat" for D♯, "A flat" for G♯. Nofret accepts either spelling whatever your notation setting says.
Switch it on with Answer by voice mode at the bottom of the Note ID button on the Practice tab, or in Settings › Sound and input. It applies wherever you're naming a note — Note ID, and Free Practice, New String or Weak Spots when they're set to naming. Finding a note means tapping the neck, so voice doesn't apply there. Turning it on asks for microphone permission and switches off the guitar sound, so playback can't be mistaken for your answer. Nofret also learns your pronunciation over time; Reset voice adaptation in that section clears what it has learned.
Yes — Settings › Notation › Tuning offers Drop D and Open G alongside Standard, and they're part of Pro. Each tuning keeps its own stage, its own history and its own progress, because a note you know cold in Standard is somewhere else entirely in Drop D. Switching tunings never disturbs what you've built in another one.
The first two stages — the six open strings, and then the low E string — are free forever, and they're the full app rather than a demo: both scored drills (Note ID and Note Hunt), the Free Practice drill, the Study page, the placement test, answering by voice, and your whole history and progress charts.
Nofret Pro adds the other seven stages, up to all 24 frets with sharps and flats; three more practice drills (New String, Weak Spots and Find Them All); and the alternate tunings, Drop D and Open G. It's a one-time purchase you keep permanently — there's no subscription and nothing renews. See the Terms for the detail.
Settings › Nofret Pro › Restore purchases is the first thing to try, especially on a new phone. If that doesn't do it, email me with the Apple Account email you purchased with and I'll sort it out.
There's nothing to cancel. Pro is bought once and doesn't renew, so no subscription is running in the background and nothing will be charged again.
Not yet. Everything is stored locally on each device for now.
Deleting the app removes everything. Inside the app, Settings › Progress bypass has Reset <tuning> progress for one tuning and Erase all progress for the lot. Nothing is stored anywhere but your phone, so there's nothing for me to delete on your behalf — see the Privacy Policy.