What do the Circle rows mean?

The two places

The keyholder place holds one person and the witness row holds three. An empty place is drawn as a dashed circle reading Add, and the witness row carries a count of how many of the three are taken.

Somebody who has been invited but has not answered is shown, not hidden. A waiting witness wears a small amber badge on their picture and no caption at all, so the badge is the only visible difference; VoiceOver reads the state in words as part of their name. A waiting keyholder is drawn as the transfer pair instead, with an Invite waiting row under it. Either way you are still solo until an acceptance lands, because the server marks you as having a keyholder only at that moment.

Somebody who declined or whose invite expired leaves the places entirely and frees the seat they were holding. Their outcome does not vanish; it becomes one of the rows below. A partner who stepped away stays in their own place instead, dimmed and labelled Stepped away, until you clear them.

What earns a row

A row is a process, not a notification. These get one: an exit request waiting on your keyholder, a cool down counting, a wait that has reached zero and is waiting on the server, a solo wait, a denied exit, each way an exit can close, a handover that ended, and an invite that was declined or expired in either role.

Three things deliberately get none. A key actually changing hands stays on the stage as the pair with its own row, because drawing it twice would be two owners describing one state. A completed handover gets none either: the new keyholder standing in the place wearing the key is the news. And your own cancellation gets none, because your own confirmed act is not news to you. All three are still written to the receipt.

Chevron or clear, never both

A running row shows a chevron and no clear control, so nothing in flight can be swept off the screen. Tapping it opens that process as a stepped sequence: for an exit, the request sent, the person who answers, and the apps opening, with the rail between the last two filling as the wait runs. The clear control appears only once a process has finished, and it takes the trailing slot the chevron had, because a finished row that still opened something would need two controls in one place.

Clearing writes to disk first and only then lets the row leave, so killing the app during the animation cannot bring it back. What is written is on your phone only and is never server state: one phone tidying its own list must not decide what another phone shows.

Finished rows also age out on their own once they are 14 days old, cleared or not; that 14 days is the row window, which governs only how long a finished row is drawn and is not the 14 day solo exit wait. Partner rows are never deleted on the server, so without a window every invite you ever sent would stack up forever and a reinstall would restore the whole wall.

At larger text sizes

At accessibility text sizes the rows split into two headed groups, Happening now and Finished, because the difference is otherwise carried by the colour of a dot. The clear control becomes its own labelled row reading Clear this, with the sentence that makes it honest underneath: it removes the row above, and the receipt keeps it.

What this does not do

A row is a description, never a control over enforcement. Clearing one changes nothing about your block, your term or any wait; it removes a row from your own phone. The rows report state the server holds, so a row cannot make something happen and cannot make something stop. Nothing here shows a keyholder anything: it is your side of the same facts, and what they see is a separate and shorter list.