Imagine sending a robot vacuum to clean the kitchen, hallway and spare room before visitors arrive. It returns to its dock, and you glance at a report showing a tidy route and an impressive-looking area total. The question you actually need answered is simpler: did it get into the spare room?
Robot vacuum reports should lead with the unfinished part of the job. That's a product-design argument, not a claim that every existing app hides missed areas. Maps are useful evidence, but you shouldn't have to inspect a miniature floor plan to learn that one of the rooms you requested still needs attention.
Completion needs a clear scope
Existing reporting already offers a foundation. iRobot's explanation of Clean Map reports describes coverage colours, cleaning statistics and partial maps when an error interrupts a job. It also describes a marked error location that you can open for troubleshooting. The article covers specified robot families and directs owners of newer LiDAR models to separate guidance, so it isn't a universal description of every Roomba app.
That distinction between a completed route and an interrupted one matters. I'd carry it into the first line of the report: which rooms were requested, which were reached, and which still need a decision. A large cleaned-area number can't answer those questions by itself. It might describe a successful kitchen clean while telling you nothing about the other room you intended to include.
A report should also preserve the job's original scope. If you selected only the kitchen, leaving the bedroom untouched is expected. If you selected both, the same untouched bedroom means something different. Comparing the outcome with the instruction is more useful than comparing it with the entire floor plan.
The language needs restraint. “Route completed” shouldn't imply that every crumb is gone. A record of where a machine travelled is not an independent inspection of the floor afterward. Apps should make their best supported claim, rather than giving a satisfying completion badge more meaning than the evidence allows.
Separate choices from interruptions
Some omissions are deliberate. Roborock's support note about its fast route says the mode skips room boundaries and may miss certain spots on the S7 Max Ultra, S8, S8+, S8 Pro Ultra and Q Revo. That's a documented speed trade-off for those models, not evidence that all robot vacuums behave the same way.
A useful report would keep that trade-off visible after the run. Choosing a quicker pass and failing to reach a room shouldn't produce indistinguishable summaries. Neither should a room you intentionally excluded and one the robot couldn't enter.
I'd like a plain list alongside the map: requested rooms with coverage recorded, rooms excluded by your settings, and requested rooms that weren't reached or weren't finished. Details could remain expandable. You could still enjoy the route animation without relying on it as the only explanation.
The app must also be honest about causes. If the robot knows only that it couldn't find a path, it should say that. Naming a closed door without reliable evidence would replace an ambiguous map with a confident guess. “Couldn't reach spare room; check access” is useful without pretending the machine understands everything in the house.
Offer a smaller second job
The best next action would be a reviewed retry of the unfinished rooms. Show what will run, retain the relevant cleaning preferences, and let you change the selection before starting. Don't quietly turn a partial retry into another whole-floor clean.
There are reasons not to resume automatically. You might have closed that door deliberately, put something fragile on the floor, or decided that another run would be too noisy. A proposed retry should reduce the work of setting up the job while leaving the timing with you.
There is a notification trade-off, too. Nobody needs a warning for every chair leg. I'd reserve attention-grabbing alerts for requested rooms or substantial areas left unfinished, with smaller gaps available in the report. Let people choose which jobs matter enough to interrupt them.
For your next scheduled clean, look at the room selection as well as the resulting coverage map. Check whether a faster mode changes what gets covered, and distinguish a partial run from an intentionally smaller one. If a room matters before guests arrive, verify that room rather than relying on the total area. A cleaning report earns its place when it helps you decide what, if anything, is still yours to do.