In the Meantime

Tap once. See who else just did.

You had coffee. So did a few thousand other people, in the last five minutes, without knowing each other. This app is a way of noticing that.

Woke up Coffee Ate Went out Meds Bed
Coffee · 07:44
You and 1,204

other people in New York had coffee just now.

You were the 3rd person on your clock to have coffee today.

One tap, from the Home Screen

A widget with your own buttons on it. You will almost never open the app to log anything — that is the point. Tap, and the number comes back.

  • Forty-six things to choose from, six on screen at a time.
  • Want more at hand? Add the widget again and give each one its own buttons.
  • Undo sits there for five seconds, on the widget itself.

What it is not

  • No accounts. No email, no password, no profile. There is nobody to be.
  • No feed and no friends. You never see a person, only a count.
  • No streaks and no guilt. Missing a day costs you nothing.
  • No notifications asking you to come back at 9pm.

Your days, drawn as a day

Every tap is a dot on a twenty-four hour ring: indigo at midnight, amber at dawn, pale gold through the afternoon. After a week the ring stops being a chart and starts being a shape you recognise.

The Today screen: six coloured buttons and the number that came back after a tap.
Today — tap, and the number arrives.
The Dial: a ring coloured like the day, with a month of coloured dots around it.
Your rhythm — a month, at a glance.
History: one card per day, each with a 24-hour rail and the taps on it.
History — one card per day.

The number has to be true

A count is the only thing this app offers, so it is the one thing treated as unable to be a lie.

  • A figure appears only once twenty people are in it. Below that you get a sentence instead.
  • Counts are rounded. "1,204" is not a person you could find.
  • When a count jumps far beyond the shape of its own recent days, the app shows no number at all. Silence beats a lie.

Only what and when, never who

Six small fields leave your phone when a tap is counted, and none of them is you. Your history stays on your device and in your own iCloud, never on our server.

  • No account, so there is nothing to profile.
  • Coordinates never leave the phone — at most a city name your phone worked out.
  • Medication, mood and the other sensitive ones are never counted unless you say so.

The exact list, in plain words →

Coming to the App Store

In the Meantime is in TestFlight now. Built for iPhone, in English, Vietnamese, German, French, Dutch, Japanese and Spanish.

Questions, or want to try it early — contact@inthemeantime.app.