I'm the developer. Silent Bell is a standalone Apple Watch app: silentbell.app
It taps your wrist at random moments as a prompt to notice where your attention is. No sound, no notification, nothing on the watch face, nothing anyone around you can perceive. Each hour is split into equal stretches with one tap placed at random inside each, so there's no rhythm to learn and nothing to brace for. A predictable reminder gets tuned out within a day; an unpredictable one keeps working.
Watch-only: no iPhone app to install, and your phone can be in another room or switched off. The taps are haptics from a running session rather than notifications, so no Focus mode silences them and nothing is left in Notification Center.
Settings are three things: 1–10 taps an hour, a minimum gap so two never land together, and which of the nine built-in haptics you feel.
Two things I'd rather say up front than have you discover:
Apple caps background running at one hour. The app pauses when the hour is up, plays a descending pattern, and one tap resumes it. That's a platform limit rather than a choice, and it's the part most likely to annoy you.
It's $4.99 once. No subscription, no account, no analytics, no networking code at all. The source is public under Apache-2.0, so the privacy claims are checkable rather than promises: github.com/jakublipinski/Silent-Bell
Two things I'd genuinely like help with.
First, the translations. Version 1.0.2 went live today and adds German, Japanese, French and Spanish. I speak none of those. They were translated by an AI and then reviewed a second time by the same AI for idiom and Apple's own platform vocabulary - better than nothing, and obviously not a native speaker reading them.
You don't need the app to check. Every string in the interface sits in one file, all four languages side by side:
github.com/jakublipinski/Silent-Bell/blob/main/SilentBell/Localizable.xcstrings
And the App Store text for all five languages is here:
github.com/jakublipinski/Silent-Bell/blob/main/COPY.md
It's 37 strings. If anything reads as machine-made, or as the wrong word rather than merely an odd one, I'd like to know. The ones I'm least confident about are the state words (Gestoppt/Aktiv/Pausiert, À l'arrêt/En cours, 停止中/実行中), whether 振動 is right for the tap in Japanese, and the setting labels generally.
Second, and more open-ended: how does anyone find a watch app these days? I'm curious what people here actually do - browse the Watch App Store, follow a site, hear about it somewhere? This one is close to unpromotable by normal means. There's nothing to screenshot that conveys it, nothing to film, and the whole point is that nothing visible happens. Any suggestions welcome, including "you're stuck".
Happy to answer anything about how it works. Promo codes are in the Code Sharing forum: https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...apple-watch-that-never-makes-a-sound.2488553/
It taps your wrist at random moments as a prompt to notice where your attention is. No sound, no notification, nothing on the watch face, nothing anyone around you can perceive. Each hour is split into equal stretches with one tap placed at random inside each, so there's no rhythm to learn and nothing to brace for. A predictable reminder gets tuned out within a day; an unpredictable one keeps working.
Watch-only: no iPhone app to install, and your phone can be in another room or switched off. The taps are haptics from a running session rather than notifications, so no Focus mode silences them and nothing is left in Notification Center.
Settings are three things: 1–10 taps an hour, a minimum gap so two never land together, and which of the nine built-in haptics you feel.
Two things I'd rather say up front than have you discover:
Apple caps background running at one hour. The app pauses when the hour is up, plays a descending pattern, and one tap resumes it. That's a platform limit rather than a choice, and it's the part most likely to annoy you.
It's $4.99 once. No subscription, no account, no analytics, no networking code at all. The source is public under Apache-2.0, so the privacy claims are checkable rather than promises: github.com/jakublipinski/Silent-Bell
Two things I'd genuinely like help with.
First, the translations. Version 1.0.2 went live today and adds German, Japanese, French and Spanish. I speak none of those. They were translated by an AI and then reviewed a second time by the same AI for idiom and Apple's own platform vocabulary - better than nothing, and obviously not a native speaker reading them.
You don't need the app to check. Every string in the interface sits in one file, all four languages side by side:
github.com/jakublipinski/Silent-Bell/blob/main/SilentBell/Localizable.xcstrings
And the App Store text for all five languages is here:
github.com/jakublipinski/Silent-Bell/blob/main/COPY.md
It's 37 strings. If anything reads as machine-made, or as the wrong word rather than merely an odd one, I'd like to know. The ones I'm least confident about are the state words (Gestoppt/Aktiv/Pausiert, À l'arrêt/En cours, 停止中/実行中), whether 振動 is right for the tap in Japanese, and the setting labels generally.
Second, and more open-ended: how does anyone find a watch app these days? I'm curious what people here actually do - browse the Watch App Store, follow a site, hear about it somewhere? This one is close to unpromotable by normal means. There's nothing to screenshot that conveys it, nothing to film, and the whole point is that nothing visible happens. Any suggestions welcome, including "you're stuck".
Happy to answer anything about how it works. Promo codes are in the Code Sharing forum: https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...apple-watch-that-never-makes-a-sound.2488553/