Stillcraft / Apps / Heartwood
Pick a real tree: by your house, your school, in the park. Photograph it, work out what it is, hug it and mark it on the map. Then keep coming back. Nothing in the app moves the friendship forward except walking up to the tree, and what you get back is a record of the time you spent together, the way a tree keeps its own: in rings. Free, with no ads and no account.
Android 9.0+ · Free · English & Русский
Photograph it whole and the photo becomes an ink engraving, its portrait. Work out the species with an illustrated key of leaves, bark and needles, like an old field guide: twelve species, from oak and birch to rowan and poplar. Then a name, one line on why this one, and a point on the map.
Hug the trunk: did your hands meet? If not, give the girth, and the forester's rule, the diameter times the species' growth factor, tells you roughly how old it is: "about 190 years, seven generations of people".
Every day you meet is a ring, and the pith is the day you met. A ring takes the season's colour, a hug warms the wood, a long absence leaves a dark line like a dry year. Tap a ring and the tree remembers that day in its own voice: "It was snowing. One line of footprints led to my trunk."
Everything happens within 50 metres of the tree. Hug it with the phone against your chest: a heartbeat plays in your hand and slows from yours toward the tree's. Hold the microphone to the bark for ten seconds of its voice, to play back in winter.
Photograph the bark, then rub it out of blank paper with a finger, like graphite: the relief comes from the real ridges of this tree. One fallen leaf a season goes into the herbarium.
Fit each new photo over a ghost of the last one, and the chronicle becomes a timelapse of your tree, season after season.
Put the phone face down. A clock runs only while it lies still. Nothing else happens.
Leave a note to yourself. It opens a year later, and only at this tree.
Up to seven trees on a map in the style of an old survey. Switch to underground and the mycelium shows between them, with news running along the threads from the friend you met last.
A tree calls only when it has a reason: the linden is in blossom, the maple is all red, the first snow, a year since you met. Twice a month at most, never at night. If you vanish it doesn't wilt: moss grows on its card, and when you come back it says "I knew you'd come."
Show a QR code; a friend reads it with their phone camera and the tree becomes theirs too, with their own rings.
| Friendship | What it takes |
|---|---|
| Stranger | The day you meet |
| Acquaintance | 3 days of meetings |
| Pal | 10 days, in 2 seasons |
| Friend | 25 days, in 3 seasons |
| Kindred | 50 days, in all 4 seasons, and a full year since you met |
On Xiaomi (MIUI / HyperOS), Huawei and some other phones, allow Autostart for Heartwood and remove battery limits so the trees' rare calls arrive on time.
JDK 17+ (Android Studio's bundled JBR works) and the Android SDK. Kotlin, Jetpack Compose, Room, osmdroid; every tree, leaf, bark rubbing and cross-section is drawn in code.
git clone https://github.com/bigdevwhale/heartwood.git cd heartwood ./gradlew assembleDebug # app.heartwood.dev ./gradlew assembleDebug -Pdemo # app.heartwood.demo: a lived-in grove in Prague ./gradlew testDebugUnitTest # rules: rings, friendship, calls, gifts ./gradlew testDebugUnitTest -Prender && python tools/shots.py # screenshots
Because that's the whole friendship. Nothing in the app moves it forward from the sofa: a ring is a day you actually walked up to the tree. GPS checks you're within 50 metres of the point you set.
Nothing bad. The tree doesn't wilt and nobody nags you. Moss grows on its card, the cross-section gets a dark line like a dry year, and when you come back the tree says "I knew you'd come."
Only for the map tiles and the weather. The weather is asked for the tree's rounded coordinates, so a ring can remember the rain. Everything else stays on the phone: no ads, no account, no analytics.
Yes. Pass it on with a QR code: a friend reads it with the phone camera and the tree becomes theirs too, with their own rings.
How many Saturdays you have left, and what you'll do with them.
The mindfulness multi-tool: breathing, Wim Hof, a bell, practices and a journal.
A strict focus timer that actually blocks distractions.
Don't drift apart from the people who matter.
Quit a habit, one day at a time.
Turn your days into a quest.
A quiet place for your mind.
Intermittent fasting, made warm and simple.
Your city, hidden in mist. Walk to reveal it.
Letters to your future self. Sealed until the day comes.
Every win deserves a little praise.
Goals under a night sky: 17 methods in one app.
Earn obols with useful apps, pay Charon for the feed.
One light, many colours: choose who you are in every part of life.
Cold water, contrast showers and the sauna, tempered like steel.
Chores as spells in a wizard's tower: keep the floors bright, wake the helpers.
A pixel-art familiar that feeds on the pages you read.
Photos and clips struck into pixel-art treasure in a dragon's cave.
A film camera for the family: shoot now, see the prints tomorrow.
They grow up faster than the photos do.
A merry app about death and growing old, in the spirit of the Day of the Dead.
Vows sealed with wax, and a ladder that makes them hard to break.
A scriptorium for what you learn: your own words, fading ink, and memory that holds.
About 940 Saturdays until they're eighteen. Spend them together.
A museum for what you want to remember: dig it up, clean it, put it on show.
Race your own ghost at everyday tasks: splits, medals and the Games.
Intrusive thoughts as ships: the lighthouse beam, the evening watch, forecasts checked.
A magic lantern deals the glass; parent and child make up the bedtime tale.
A date night for two on a night train: a conductor's questions, the phone as the table between you.
The same questions to your child, yourself or a grandparent, year after year, laid as a mosaic.
Your mind is a kite on a string. A few soft tugs a day bring it back to here.
There is too much music. One album a week, a whole side at a time, on a turntable or a tape deck.
There's too much to watch. So nothing gets watched. Your watchlist as a nineties video rental store.
Every date is a quest. The two of you are a party of heroes, and the phone is your game master.
A cosy lucid-dreaming trainer. In a dream, the top never falls.
A cosy pixel-art meditation tracker. Sit still, and shy animals come out.
A valve radio for falling asleep: tune into made-up stations of rain, sea and night trains, and let it drift off the air.
Five pots for everything you've never tried: sow a seed from a catalogue of new things, water it each time you go back, and when it blooms it's yours.
A fridge door for two: the shopping list, whose turn, notes, worries face down and envelopes that open only together. The phones sync at home, with no server.
A pedometer where your steps carry the village post. You are the new postman of a small village by a river, and its letters, stories and seasons go on for years.
Let your wishes age before you buy them. Every urge to buy goes into a bottle on the rack; when it's ripe, you open it without guilt or pour it into the barrel of your real dream.
Every walk is an assignment from the district paper. The editor wires one ordinary thing to shoot, with a twist; you bring back a frame, it's printed as a halftone, and on Sunday the week comes out as an issue.
A diary, index cards, telegrams and letters typed on a typewriter. There's no backspace that erases: a mistake is struck out or painted over and stays on the sheet, so you write slower, and more honestly.
Every shopping trip is a run. You keep a courier office of one: the household orders on the waybill, each shop learns its own shelf order, and every delivered waybill pays in brass tokens for a sign, a bicycle, a van one day.
The things of your hobbies come alive with practice. Every session lights a candle in a little pixel-art Japanese house; a guitar, a ball of yarn or a sourdough starter shivers, opens an eye, steps off the shelf as a house spirit and keeps growing for years.
A little movement all day long instead of an hour twice a week. Nine pixel-art tin toys on a shelf, each a family of movements; a minute or three of squats, balance or breathing winds one up for two hours and puts a pin in the day's music-box drum.
Make friends the way it actually works, and keep them for years. An old sea chart of your people: small sorties of courage to meet them, bridges that grow with every hour together, and fog that rolls in when you stop.
Step out of your comfort zone a little every day. Your fears become circus acts: pick what you find hard, and the bill offers three small real-life numbers a day, from warm-up to premiere — with a drum roll before and applause after.
Over a thousand evidence-graded protocols for a longer, calmer, happier life. Your body is a blueprint with eight systems; every protocol is a mod you try on yourself for 14 days, and the lab shows whether it moved anything before it enters your firmware.
Someone already lives in your flat. Find out who — and help them leave. A slow, quiet haunting on your own photos: marks in your rooms, notes in the evening, words through the static, and after two weeks one real thing left to do.
A small present every day, from your past self. You can't surprise yourself unless you forget: fill a capsule machine with little presents for future days, let the words seal, and turn the crank for one a day.
A budget kept like a detective's case file. Spending is evidence, categories are suspects with police photos, and when the clues show a pattern, a case opens: you name the motive and hand down the verdict.
A pilgrim's pass: come to a place of power, a church, a mosque, a synagogue, a spring or an old tree, sit there ten minutes without the phone, and the book gets a stamp nobody else has.
A book of hours for your own practices: the day divided into hours by the sun, a bell for each, and whatever you put into them written into an illuminated manuscript.
Be drawn one of the 117 billion people who have ever lived, and read their life in a parish register: the doors that were open, the ones that were shut, and what was left behind.
Enamel pin badges for the small deeds of a day, each with an order typed out, a rubber stamp and a fanfare. Nothing to plan and no streaks: in the evening the commission asks what happened.
Put a worry on an old brass balance as a stone, and weights with arguments go on the other pan, one by one, until it tips. 1,209 concrete worries, 15,900 weights.
A pet that lives under your bed and eats fear. Horror films and books feed it, anxious news is fast food, and your own fears it guards at night.
A bookshop of books that don't exist. Every day a customer asks for one, and you find it on the shelf by writing its title, first line and blurb.
Tarot with no bad cards. The Auntie finds the good even in Death, gives you an omen for the day and asks in the evening whether it came true.
A pocket field guide to the spirits of your real houseplants. Catch them with the camera; they live by the real sun over your town, ask you to touch the soil, grow, hatch from cuttings and fight real pests.
A talk by the fire with the people close to you: hold your stones together, and sparks bring the questions.
A diary of the cafés you keep coming back to: each gets a page and a sugar packet, and every cup leaves a coffee stain on the page.
Found a bug, missing a feature, or want it in your language? Tell us on GitHub.
Open an issue