Den

Den is a work timer, built for ADHD and autistic adults.

Work in your own lengths.

Twenty-five minutes is a number someone made up

It came from a kitchen timer in the 1980s, and every Pomodoro app since has handed the same number to everybody. Den has no fixed interval. It starts from a way of working you pick, and then proposes the block length your own completed blocks support — showing you the counts it used.

That is a statement about arithmetic, not about you. Den measures nothing except the clock and your own taps.

Four ways of working

A starting point, never a box. Every setting underneath is adjustable on its own, and nothing you choose is stored as a fact about you.

Spark
for when starting is the hard part

Short blocks, cues that vary, a firm end.

Groove
for when stopping is the hard part

Long blocks, cues that never change, a warned and gradual end. The block is a floor, not a ceiling.

Weave
for when it is both

The same ritual every time, around work that changes.

Plain
just a timer

One length, one cue, nothing learned. All of the above switched off.

The cue arrives

Every other feature is worthless if a cue is silently dropped. On Android Den runs a foreground service carrying a live countdown, and sets an exact alarm beside it, so the cue survives Doze and a killed process.

Prove it with the screen off

Den has a self-test: lock your phone and put it down, and it will cue you in sixty seconds. Pass or fail is reported plainly, and a failure points at the setting responsible — including the vendor-specific ones that stop background apps on some phones.

Verified on a Pixel 10 Pro XL: the cue fired through Doze with the screen locked.

More than one thing at once

There is no ordering, no percent complete and no deadline on a thread. A thread cannot be late.

Your data stays yours

What Den cannot do

The app asks for no permission to see which other apps you run, no location, no camera and no microphone. It cannot know what else is on your screen, and it does not ask.

What it deliberately is not

Get Den

In a browser

The web version is a working surface for your list — the launchpad, the runway, threads and hard dates. It keeps everything in that browser on that device. Cues need the phone: a browser tab cannot wake you, so the web version does not pretend to.

On Android

Not on Google Play yet, so this installs directly. Your phone will ask you to permit installation from the browser once — that prompt is Android doing its job, and you can revoke the permission afterwards.

Take arm64-v8a unless you know otherwise; it fits essentially every phone sold since about 2017. The others are here for older 32-bit hardware and for emulators.

Those are SHA-256 sums of the files themselves — shasum -a 256 <file> should print the same thing. A plain list is here too.

What the download actually asks for

The permissions in the file you install are checked against the release artefact before it is published, not against a manifest someone remembers writing: vibration, notifications, wake lock, a foreground service, an exact alarm, and network access for sync. Absent, and verified absent — app-usage access, the package list, location, microphone, camera, logs, contacts, external storage, and drawing over other apps.

Where it is up to

An early build, not on any store yet. Android and the web are the two you can get above; the iOS build compiles and runs in the simulator. Part of the Vitark suite, alongside Still and Train.

In this build the block length is yours to set. The proposing described above is the next phase of work and is not in the version you can download — so rather than show you a number and imply it was computed from your history, it stays a number you chose, and every record it writes says so. Everything else on this page is here: the launchpad, the two-minute door, the runway, the three-state list, break, threads and hard dates, and the self-test.

Version 0.1.0. Expect rough edges, and expect them to be honest ones.