Our Own Guides and Our Own Apps Use Different Words: Tracker vs Watchlist

I work on OnePassApps, so this is our own product, and this is our own documentation disagreeing with our own interface. Everything below was read on the live site on 4 November 2026: the guide pages as plain HTTPS HTML with no JavaScript, and the apps as rendered pages in a browser.

The short version: the guides are not wrong about what the apps do. They are written in a different vocabulary, and in three places they are vaguer than the interface they describe. If you are writing your own integration, or your own support article, the app is the more precise source.

How this was measured

• The two guide pages and the guide index were fetched as plain HTML with a desktop Chrome user agent and no JavaScript, then stripped to text.
• The two apps were opened in a real browser, signed out, and read three times each: the first tab, the detail page for one title, and the third tab.
• Both sides were counted with the same list of words, case-sensitively, in the text a visitor actually sees - not the page source, so nothing was counted that a reader could not read.

MovieMatcherAI: the guide says Tracker, the app says Watchlist

The guide at /guides/movie-tracker names the personal feature Tracker, and it names it repeatedly:

• "Signing in unlocks the personal Tracker, ratings, notes and reactions."
• "03 Add a rating, private note or reaction, then return to Tracker to review your lists or Browse to explore further titles."
• "a free account adds the private Tracker, ratings, notes and reactions."

It also promises two lists: "Keep Unwatched and Watched lists, with title details that let you move an item between them", and the second step reads "Sign in to add the title to Unwatched or mark it Watched."

The app does not use those words. Here is the count on each surface, signed out:

Every "Tracker" in the guide is a capital T and a feature name. The app never uses it as a label. The one lowercase "tracker" that does appear is in a different sentence, on a title page, and it means something else: "Not interested hides this title from your recommendations only. Your ratings and tracker are unchanged."

The app's own words are on the buttons. On a title page the controls are Watch trailer, Watchlist and Mark watched. The third tab is called Watchlist, and signed out it says "Your watchlist starts after sign-in" and "Sign in to keep films for later, mark them watched and add notes."

So "Unwatched" appears twice in the guide and never in the app, and "Tracker" appears four times in the guide and never in the app. The guide's own heading is "How to track movies and TV in a private watchlist" - the heading says watchlist once, and the body then says Tracker four times without ever using the word again. That inconsistency is on one page, not spread across two.

The same guide, on filters

The guide says "Search the catalogue and combine supported discovery, genre and release-date filters."

The app shows four filter controls and three views: All films, New releases, Top rated, then filters Rating, Genre, Year and Person, with a Clear filters control and a counter reading "20 of 89". A Rating filter and a Person filter are on screen; the guide names neither.

NewsFlow: the guide never states the listen limit the app states

The NewsFlow guide is careful about limits. It says "Guest source selection is read-only", "Fresh summary generation and account source changes require sign-in", "The current Inbox covers a recent time window, not a complete archive", and "Original-only sources do not offer generated briefs or audio".

It is also vaguer than the app in exactly one place, and it is the place a reader is most likely to hit. The guide answers "Can I listen without an account?" with:

"Supported audio for the current public Inbox is available to guests within shared capacity and usage limits."

The app puts a number on the same screen. It reads "Guests get 10 free listens a day. Sign in for more." The guide contains the number 10 nowhere. A guest reading only the guide cannot tell what the allowance is; a guest reading only the app can.

Two more differences in the same direction. The app has a Saved tab - signed out it says "Saving stories needs an account. Sign in to keep them on every device" and "Nothing saved yet" - and the guide never mentions Saved at all. The app's Sources tab shows "9 followed", "10 shown", "Starter sources are read-only. Sign in to choose your own." and a per-source licence line such as "Electronic Frontier Foundation and credited authors · CC BY 4.0 · Adapted feed text". The guide describes managing the source catalogue after signing in, and never mentions licences. On the movie side, the title page carries a Sources and licences section and the guide does not mention licences either.

The bigger gap: two guides, nine apps

The guide index at /guides opens with a promise about the browser-local tools:

"Browser-local tools process the files and details you choose in your tab. They are free, need no account and never use credits; export your work before leaving."

Then it lists what exists. The index says "All guides 2 apps" and names two: NewsFlow and MovieMatcherAI.

Two guides cover two hosted apps. None of the seven browser studios has a guide, and the sitemap agrees: it carries /guides, /guides/newsflow and /guides/movie-tracker, and no studio guide. So the index makes a general statement about browser-local tools and then documents none of them.

That is the piece I would flag to anyone deciding where to look first. For the seven studios, the tool pages themselves are the documentation. For the two hosted apps, there is a guide - and the app is the more exact of the two.

What the guide gets right that the app does not

This is not a claim that the interface beats the documentation. It is the other way round in places, and the guide is the better source for two things:

• The guide states the limits in one place, including "TV tracking covers whole series, not seasons, episodes or repeated watches", and it says plainly that "a listed provider is not a regional availability verdict". The interface shows you the provider line, not the caveat.
• The guide explains what a rating does: "Saving a personal rating marks the title Watched and preserves an existing first-watched date." The interface shows a rating field and a separate Mark watched button, which reads as two unrelated actions until you know they are linked.

If you are writing against OnePassApps

Open the app and read the guide, in that order. The guide tells you what the product is meant to do and where it stops. The app tells you what it actually says on the screen, down to the button labels and the numbers. Where the two disagree on a word, follow the app, because that is the string a visitor sees and the string a script has to match.

If you are reading a page and a word does not appear, that word is not part of the product today. "Tracker" is not a screen. "Unwatched" is not a list.

Everything quoted here was read from the live pages today. The guide pages are static HTML and load no app code, so the guide text above is exactly what a crawler and a reader with JavaScript switched off both get.

The two pages this post measures are the guide index at https://app.onepassapps.com/guides?utm_source=devto&utm_medium=post&utm_campaign=guides-vs-apps&utm_content=guides-link and the MovieMatcherAI app at https://app.onepassapps.com/apps/movie-tracker?utm_source=devto&utm_medium=post&utm_campaign=guides-vs-apps&utm_content=movie-tracker-link.