Life progress for iPhone
Life Progress shows you where you are — in today, in this week, in this year, and in your life — and lets you leave a mark on the way through. How the moment feels, what you are doing, one line about it. Those marks tint your life grid, so “how has this year actually gone” becomes something you can look at rather than something you guess.
iPhone and iPad · free · no account, no server, and it asks for no permissions at all
The day fills in hour by hour, which is the ordinary part. The useful part is underneath it: because you have told the app when you sleep, it subtracts the sleep still ahead of you from the hours still on the clock. “Seven hours left” and “four hours left that are yours” are different facts, and the second one is the number it puts on the screen, because it is the only one you can plan an evening around.
How far through the week you are, how far through the month, how many days are left in the year — and, separately, how many weekends. Weekends are counted on their own because for most people they are the part of the remaining year that is actually available. It is the same twelve months either way; the second number is the one that tells you whether to book something.
Your whole life as a grid: one cell for each year, ten cells to a row, so every row you look at is a decade. It is the view that makes a life legible at a glance, because ten is the unit people already think in. You can label the rows by your age or by calendar year — the first makes it a life, the second makes it a history, and the same grid reads differently depending on which you choose.
The grid is not a picture; it is a way in. Tap a year and it opens into its twelve months. Tap a month and it opens into its days. Tap a day and there is room to write on it — a look back if the day has already happened, a plan if it has not. The app knows which of those two it is asking for, so the same field does a different job on either side of today.
Pick how the moment feels. If you want, add what you are doing and one line about it; if you do not want to, skip both and the mark still counts. Five preset states and eight preset activities come with it, and when none of them is the right word you can build your own and pick its colour. There is nothing to configure before you start and nothing to maintain afterwards.
This is the part that most progress apps do not have. A marked day is not just recorded, it is shown: the cells you have marked carry the average of how you felt and how many marks are in them, so the grid stops being a countdown and starts being a record. A year you got through badly and a year you got through well do not look the same, and you did not have to keep a diary to find that out.
Give a milestone an age and it lands on your timeline where that age falls — school, a move, a birth, whatever the marker is. Leave the age out and it turns into something different: a thing you want to do, sitting in its own list with a box to tick on the day you do it. One list holds the fixed points of a life and the open ones, and the only difference between them is whether you knew the date.
Set your bedtime and your wake-up, then move the rest of your hours between sleep, work, commuting, meals, phone and self-care — and add your own categories for the things only you spend time on. Each one is then priced twice: what it costs you per day, and what it costs across a whole lifetime in years. Forty minutes a day is a number nobody reacts to. The same forty minutes as years of your life is a number people react to.
A separate view for the stretch behind you: your average, whether the recent marks are improving, declining or steady, the spread between your best and worst, how settled you have been, what you were most often doing, and which part of the day you mark most. One bar per day sits next to the others. It is a description, not a verdict — there is no target to come in under and no score attached to any of it.
Dark, warm light and pure light, picked by hand. The interface exists in nine languages and follows your phone unless you tell it otherwise. The colour work is not decoration: accent colours are deepened until text on them clears contrast standards in every theme, and colour is never the only channel — the sleep window on today’s bar is drawn as a separate row of marks rather than a fourth shade, precisely so that it survives colour blindness and a screen reader.
There is no account to make and nothing to import. This is the whole of the setup, written out so you can tell before installing whether it is the shape you want.
Two honest limits. A life expectancy is an input, not a prediction — you chose the number, the grid is only as long as you made it, and nothing here knows anything about your health. And nothing in this app treats anything: if time passing is a thing you cannot stop thinking about, or if a low stretch has taken your sleep, your appetite or your ability to work, that belongs with a doctor, and going to one is not an overreaction.
Nothing. There is no network code in the app at all — not a single request for content, for updates or for anything else. Searching the source for every way a request can be made returns nothing, which is a stronger statement than a privacy policy: it is not that the app promises not to send anything, it is that it has no way to.
There is no account, no sign-in and no sign-up, so nobody has your email address — you were never asked for it. Your birthday, your marks, your notes, your milestones and your settings live in one local database file on the phone and are deleted with the app.
The app asks for no permissions at all. Not location, not camera, not contacts, not photos, and not notifications. The iOS build carries no permission purpose strings whatsoever, which is why you will never see a permission prompt from it — there is nothing for the system to ask you about.
There is no analytics SDK and no advertising SDK. Nothing counts your opens on a server, nothing knows how you have felt, and nothing knows whether you have used this once or every day for a year. That information exists on your phone and nowhere else. And when you want it gone, one item in Settings erases every mark, every custom status and every milestone on the device in a single step.
Free. This version has no in-app purchase, no subscription and no paywall — there is no purchase screen in the app, and no feature is held behind one.
There is also no advertising. An app whose whole subject is how little time you have would be a strange place to sell you thirty seconds of someone else’s, and there is not a banner, an interstitial or a rewarded video anywhere in it.
No. Nearly every app in this category has one — several of them put the word in their own name — and this one does not. If a widget is the reason you are looking, one of those will serve you better. What this app has instead is the half that ends where their widgets end: the marks, the grid they colour, the time budget and the milestones.
No, and there is nowhere to make one. There is no sign-in screen anywhere in the app because there is no server behind it. Nothing syncs, nothing is uploaded, and no email address is collected at any point.
No, and it could not if it wanted to. The app has no notification capability at all and asks for no notification permission, so nothing can arrive on your lock screen. You see where you are when you open it and at no other time. If you would rather be prompted, set your own alarm — that way the prompt is something you chose.
No. There is no export, no import, no backup file and no sync, so the marks you make live on the phone that made them and go when the app goes. That is a real limitation and worth knowing before you put months into it. It is the direct cost of there being no server.
From you. You type it in during setup and you can change it afterwards. It is not an estimate the app made about you and it is not based on anything it knows, because it knows nothing about you — it only sets how many cells the grid has.
Then close it, and possibly do not install it. This app makes no claim that watching time pass improves anything, and for some people the view is not useful. There is nothing to lose by stopping, and one item in Settings erases every mark, custom status and milestone on the device. If the thought of time running out is something you cannot put down, that is worth talking to a doctor about rather than an app.