A small phone-rest app that won't let you out alone. You set offline hours. The few apps that pull on you go dark. To skip a window, you ask a person — not a slider.
9pm to 7am every evening, all of Sunday, the morning before work — whatever shape your week needs.
Not all of them. The few that pull on you. Phone calls and messages still come through.
Your partner gets a notification with a reason. They approve, or they don't. Replies come back inside the app.
Logged where your partner can see, so it costs both money and a little face.
Streaks make you anxious about a missed day, then quit altogether.
Rest is not a competition. There is nothing to win.
If the trick is in the app, the app can talk you out of it.
When you ask out, a real human reads it. They say yes or no.
The window opens itself when it ends. No friction, no celebration.
They never do. They only see when you ask out.
When you ask to skip a window, your partner gets a single notification with the reason you wrote. They can let you out for thirty minutes, or hold you to it. Either way, they write back. It takes about ten seconds.
They never see your screen time. They never see which apps you blocked. They only see the asks.
There's no dashboard to optimise. No score to chase. No community feed.
Just a weekly rhythm
of offline hours, held in place by another human being.
The product is small on purpose. Rest should be.
The window stays closed until they reply. Most people set up Embertide with someone who shares their evening, so the asks happen when both of you are around.
Yes — but it costs you a 24-hour cool-down. Long enough that you can't undo a rest window in the moment of wanting to.
It's there because some nights you actually need out, and it shouldn't depend on whether your partner is awake. The donation is real, and your partner sees the receipt.
Yes. Asks go out by SMS to anyone, with a small private link to reply. No app needed on their side.
Because the product is the rest, not the data about it. We log the bare minimum so the rhythm view exists; no further.
Embertide for iOS opens the first windows soon. Drop your email — we'll write once when public download is ready.