MARV is a privacy-first iOS app for anyone who makes recurring visits. Store contact details, visit notes, follow-up dates, and full visit history — all locally on your device. No cloud. No accounts. No data leaving your phone.
Whether you’re doing pastoral visits, in-home sales calls, outreach work, healthcare home visits, or any other kind of recurring personal contact — you need to remember context. Who is this person? When did you last see them? What did you talk about? What did you commit to following up on?
MARV gives you a simple, fast, focused tool to capture and retrieve that context. Add a contact, take notes after a visit, set a follow-up date. The next time you’re heading out, review your due visits and walk in prepared.
Because the people you visit share personal information with you — address, home situation, personal circumstances — MARV is built with privacy as a non-negotiable foundation. Everything stays on your device. Always.
MARV is focused and intentional. No bloat. Every feature serves the core mission: helping you show up prepared and follow through.
Each person in MARV has a profile with their name, address, and any contact details you choose to store. No required fields — store as much or as little as is useful. Contacts are completely private and never shared.
After each visit, add a timestamped note: what you discussed, what you observed, what was requested or promised. Notes are rich text and unlimited in length. Review your history before the next visit so you walk in remembering everything.
Set a follow-up date for each contact. MARV surfaces your upcoming and overdue visits so you never let someone fall through the cracks. Sort by next due date to plan your week at a glance.
Every visit is logged with a date and your notes. Scroll back through months or years of history for any contact. See how often you’ve visited, how much time has passed, and what the arc of your relationship looks like over time.
Find any contact instantly by name. Filter your list by upcoming visits, overdue visits, or recently visited. As your list grows, search keeps everything instantly accessible without scrolling through a long roster.
MARV’s interface is designed for field use — you’re standing at someone’s door or sitting in their living room. Add a visit note in seconds with large tap targets and a clean, distraction-free layout that works in bright sunlight or dim rooms.
Store a contact’s address and add location notes (gate code, apartment number, parking instructions, nearby landmarks) so you and anyone you might send in your place can find them easily. All stored locally, never uploaded.
Contacts with an approaching or past follow-up date are highlighted prominently. Sort your list to see who is most overdue first. MARV doesn’t nag you with notifications — it surfaces the right information when you open the app and check your route.
MARV can optionally read your iOS Contacts to help you quickly populate new visit records. If granted, contact data is read on-device only and never uploaded. You can decline this permission and use all core features by entering information manually.
MARV is for anyone who visits people on a recurring basis and needs to remember context, keep notes, and follow through consistently.
For pastors, deacons, elders, and ministry workers who make regular house visits or hospital visits, MARV is a private, respectful way to keep track of who you’ve seen, what they shared, what you prayed about, and when you need to go back. The people you visit trust you with sensitive personal information — MARV ensures that information stays only in your hands.
Non-profit volunteers, community organizers, and outreach workers who canvas neighborhoods benefit from having structured contact records. Note what stage each household is at, when you last knocked, what was discussed, and when to return. MARV helps you build a complete picture of a territory over time without spreadsheets or paper forms.
Independent field sales professionals who manage their own client relationships without a corporate CRM — or who prefer a lightweight private tool alongside their CRM — use MARV to capture rich personal context about the people they call on. Record the personal details that matter for relationship-building that your corporate CRM doesn’t have room for.
Independent care workers and social workers who make scheduled home visits and need a private, offline record of visit notes — especially when operating in areas with poor connectivity — find MARV ideal. All notes stay local, access is protected by your device’s Face ID or passcode, and there’s no corporate data breach risk.
From your first contact to weekly route planning — exactly how to use MARV.
Setting up a new person in MARV takes under a minute. Here’s the complete process.
From the main contact list, tap the plus icon in the top-right corner. The “New Contact” sheet opens.
Name is the only required field. Everything else — address, phone, notes — is optional. Enter the name and fill in whatever details are useful right now. You can always add more later.
Enter their street address and any access notes in the Location Notes field: things like “blue house with white fence,” “call before arriving,” or “apartment 4B — buzzer is broken, knock.” These notes appear prominently when you open the contact on your way to a visit.
Tap the “Follow-Up Date” field and choose a target date for your next visit. This is what drives MARV’s upcoming/overdue sorting. If you just visited this person and won’t return for a month, set it a month out. If they’re a priority, set it for next week.
Tap Save. The contact is created. If you just came from a visit with them, tap “Add Visit Note” from their profile to log what happened. Assign today’s date and write your notes while they’re fresh.
The faster you record notes after a visit, the more useful they are. Here’s how to do it quickly.
Search their name or find them in your list. Open their profile. Review your last visit notes to refresh your memory before you knock.
From the contact’s profile, tap “Add Visit Note.” Today’s date is pre-filled. The note editor opens. Type quickly — even a few bullet points is enough.
Note what was discussed, how the person seemed, anything they asked for, any commitments you made. Don’t worry about formatting — just capture the substance. You can always come back and add more. Good notes to capture: mood/situation, specific topics discussed, anything you promised to do, anything you want to remember for next time.
Tap Save. You’ll be returned to the contact profile where you can immediately update the next follow-up date. Set it based on what was discussed — did they ask you to come back next week? In a month? Set it now while you remember.
Go back to your main list. The contact now shows “Visited today” and your next visit date. If you have more visits scheduled, the list sorted by due date shows you who’s next.
Use MARV at the start of each week (or each day) to plan your route and prioritize who to see.
Tap the sort/filter control and choose “Sort by Follow-Up Date (soonest first).” Overdue contacts will float to the top. This is your priority list.
Look at the top 5–10 due contacts and their addresses. Mentally (or on a map) cluster them geographically so you’re not driving back and forth across town. MARV shows the address on the contact list row for quick scanning.
Before you pull up to someone’s house, open their profile and scan the last 2–3 visit notes. This takes 30 seconds and completely changes the quality of the conversation — you arrive already in context, remembering what was said last time.
After each stop, add a quick note and set the next date. By the time you get home, everyone you visited is logged and the next round of visits is already scheduled.
One of the most valuable things MARV does is give you instant access to everything you’ve observed about a person over weeks or months. Here’s how to use history effectively.
Open any contact. Their profile shows a chronological list of visit notes, newest first. Scroll down to go further back in time. Each note shows the date it was recorded and your full text. Tap a note to expand it for easier reading if it’s long.
There’s no limit to how many notes or how far back your history goes. MARV stores everything indefinitely until you choose to delete it.
Tap any visit note and then tap “Edit” to update it. You might add context you forgot, correct an error, or add a follow-up item you thought of later. Edits are saved immediately.
As your list grows to 50, 100, or 200+ contacts, here are the tools and habits that keep it manageable.
The search bar filters your list in real time by name. If you know who you’re looking for, type the first few letters and they appear instantly. Don’t scroll through a 200-person list — just search.
Switch to “Sort by Follow-Up Date” to see your most overdue contacts at the top. Work through them systematically. As you visit and update their next dates, they’ll drop back down the list, revealing the next group to prioritize.
If you have 150 contacts but can only visit 10 per week, set follow-up dates spaced out proportionally. A contact you see monthly should have a follow-up date 4 weeks out after each visit. One you see quarterly should be 12 weeks out. Realistic scheduling means the overdue list is always actionable rather than overwhelming.
If someone moves away, passes away, or is no longer part of your visit rotation, consider clearing their follow-up date rather than deleting their record. This keeps their history available without them showing up as overdue.
Have a question about MARV? Submit it below. I review every submission and post answers here publicly so the entire user community benefits. Feature requests and feedback are always welcome.
No user-to-user discussion. All responses come directly from the developer.
In its current form, MARV is designed as a personal tool — one person’s contacts on one device. There is no shared database or syncing between team members right now.
For a team use case, the typical approach is for each team member to have their own MARV with their own territory of contacts. If two people share a territory, they each maintain their own notes independently.
Team/shared functionality is something I’m actively thinking about for a future version. The challenge is doing it without compromising the privacy-first architecture. If you have specific needs, send them in — it helps me understand what a team feature should look like.
Bulk import is not available in the current version — contacts are added one at a time through the app. I know this is a pain point for people migrating from spreadsheets or other tools, and CSV import is on the feature roadmap.
In the meantime, if you’re willing to spend a couple of evenings data-entering, I’d suggest prioritizing your most active contacts first and adding them over time. Most users find they’re working from a core list of 20–50 people even if their full roster is larger. Let me know your CSV column structure and I can keep that in mind when designing the import feature.
This is the honest trade-off of a privacy-first design: because your data isn’t in the cloud, there is no server copy to restore from if you lose your phone without a backup.
The best protection is enabling iCloud Backup on your iPhone (Settings → [your name] → iCloud → iCloud Backup). App data is included in iCloud backups, so if you get a new phone and restore from an iCloud backup, MARV and all your data should be there.
Similarly, if you do encrypted local backups through Finder (Mac) or iTunes (PC), app data is included there too. I recommend making a habit of regular backups. An in-app manual export option is also on the roadmap so you can explicitly create a portable backup file.
This is one of the most frequently requested features and it’s firmly on the roadmap. The plan is to add optional local notifications (not server-based push) — so when a follow-up date arrives, your device will notify you locally without anything going through an external server.
I’m intentionally making this opt-in and configurable: you’ll be able to set how many days in advance to be reminded, and per-contact overrides. No ETA yet, but it’s actively being worked on. You’ll see it in an upcoming update.
It’s a fair question. Apple Notes and Reminders work, but they’re general-purpose tools. Here’s what MARV gives you that those apps don’t:
If you’re visiting 10 people occasionally, Notes probably works fine. MARV starts to pay off when you’re managing 30+ people with regular visit cadences and want that history to actually be useful and accessible.
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MARV is 100% on-device. No data is ever collected, transmitted, or stored outside your phone.
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