Five phases, four tabs

The trip timeline, the tab that swaps, and where each phase's items come from.

Checked against the app on 2026-10-12 (1.1).

Phase	What it holds	When it's for
Prep	errands and tasks before you touch a bag	days before
Pack	the suitcase itself — physical objects	the night before
Travel	what happens on the day you leave	departure day
Plans	outfits, activities, notes for while you're there	during
Return	getting home, and what you learned	arrival onward

Five exist; four are visible

Every trip auto-creates all five PackingList records. The tab bar shows four at a time.

Prep and Return trade places at one date boundary — the day after arrival. Before it, Prep is in the bar and Return isn't; after it, they swap. A Phases submenu in the ••• menu reaches all five at any time, so nothing is ever unreachable.

The detached circle beside the tabs is the magic +. It's declared as a fifth, search-role tab, which is why the bar holds four content tabs rather than five.

Why a timeline instead of one list

"Pack for the trip" is a single undifferentiated task with no natural entry point. Splitting it into five gives each part a moment when it becomes relevant, so you're never looking at the passport-check item while you're deciding how many shirts to bring.

The split also means the trip home is modeled rather than assumed. Return is a real phase with its own items, not an afterthought once you're already away.

What lands where

Seeded items carry the phase they belong to. Three phases default new entries to To-Do rather than Item:

Phase	Default type for new rows
Prep	To-Do
Pack	Item
Travel	Item
Plans	To-Do
Return	To-Do

This is the usual reason a typed "3 chargers" shows no quantity — only Items display one. To-Dos, Errands and Notes never do, even if a number was stored.

Double Check

A computed section on Travel. Not stored, not editable as a section.

It is pinned to the bottom, below every section including the completed group — not the top. That is deliberate: "People work a list top to bottom, and this is the last gate before the door — so it reads last."

Its position is fixed by construction. It is its own collection-view section rather than rows appended to the last item section, so reordering sections cannot move it, and it stays put whether or not the COMPLETED group is present.

It led the list in an earlier build, which is why some older descriptions put it first. Checked on device, 2026-09-18.

It gathers every item flagged Critical on the Pack List, and gives each its own confirmation tick — independent of whether the item is packed. Ticking "packed" at 11pm and confirming at the door are different cognitive events, and the app treats them as different acts.

31 items ship Critical-flagged; any item can be marked Critical.

How a critical item looks: its checkbox is replaced by a red exclamationmark.circle. Ordinary rows show a plain gray hollow circle. The warning occupies the control you tap, rather than sitting beside it. On You rows are deliberately excluded from this treatment and keep plain circles, so two similar confirm controls never share a screen.

The homeward leg

Three mechanisms, which are easy to confuse:

Mechanism	What it does	Repeatable
Per-item "Needed on the way home"	marks which rows come back; defaults on	—
Pack for Return (Lists menu)	unticks Pack and Travel so you can work them again	yes
The one-time offer near the return date	proposes the same reset once	no

~17 seeded items are home-only and excluded from the outbound list.

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