Stillcraft / Apps / Pilgrim
Pilgrims carried a little book that was stamped at every holy place they reached. Pilgrim is that book. The common map knows houses of worship of every faith, wayside chapels, springs, old trees, stones and heights; come to one, turn the screen off and sit ten minutes. The screen, your location and the motion sensor keep it honest. Then two words, what you left there and what you took, and the stamp comes down: its ink from where the sun was, its marks from the weather. Free, no ads, no account.
Android 9.0+ · Free · English & Русский
The time runs only while the screen is dark. A glance at a notification is forgiven; ten seconds of a lit screen means the phone was picked up. Walk away from the place, or a minute of walking with the phone, and the sitting ends. A faked location never counts. After ten minutes the stamp is yours, and you may stay as long as you like.
The frame belongs to the place, the silhouette to its kind, the number to your visit. Gold ink at dawn, ochre by day, cinnabar at sunset, indigo at night. Rain bleeds it, snow leaves frost, wind smears a second strike, fog fades it. Twenty minutes add a ring, forty a ring of beads.
What did you leave here? What did you take? One word each, written in the margin by the stamp: a grudge and silence, hurry and air.
Leave a note at a place for yourself. It opens only there, on another day, after ten minutes.
Not on the map? Mark it, from a good GPS fix, not within 300 m of home, two a week. It goes in pencil and is inked on your third day there; then you can leave an anonymous note for the OpenStreetMap mappers. A map point that's off can be tied to where the place really is.
The whole map is never shown. Once a week the book tells of one place nearby, the way people do: “They say there's a spring ten minutes' walk north-west of home…” On the map it's a circle with a question mark. You'll have to find it.
Three places in a day make a walk: a page of its own, the stamps on one thread. Sit at a place in winter, spring, summer and autumn and the circle closes; give it a name of your own.
Home's places fill the first notebook; every faraway town starts another under its own leather cover. The year's scroll rolls up the time in silence, the walks, a little map of each town and every pair of words.
| When | On the stamp | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Dawn | Gold ink | From before sunrise to an hour after |
| Day | Ochre | The sun is up |
| Sunset | Cinnabar | An hour around sunset |
| Night | Indigo | The sun is down |
| Rain | The ink bleeds | Wet paper |
| Snow | Frost on the stamp | Cold hands, cold rubber |
| Wind | A smeared second strike | The hand shook |
Before the first sitting at each kind of place, the book gives a few short lines on how to come in: where to take off shoes, when to sit in the courtyard instead. The same even tone for every faith, and no symbols of faith anywhere, only buildings and nature.
JDK 17+ (Android Studio's bundled JBR works) and the Android SDK. Kotlin, Jetpack Compose, Room, DataStore, osmdroid; the stamps are inked in code, and the sitting runs in a foreground service.
git clone https://github.com/bigdevwhale/pilgrim.git cd pilgrim ./gradlew testDebugUnitTest assembleDebug ./gradlew assembleDebug -Pdemo # app.pilgrim.demo: a year in Kazan and a walk in St Petersburg ./gradlew testDebugUnitTest -Prender --tests '*RenderArt*' # the stamp sheet and every screen to PNG
No. It's about going somewhere quiet and staying there without the phone. Houses of worship of every faith are on the map, next to springs, trees and stones, and nothing in the app takes a side.
A glance at a notification is fine. Ten seconds of a lit screen before ten minutes are up, and there's no stamp this time: the place will wait. After ten minutes nothing takes the stamp away.
Mark your own: a bench by the water, a hill, the yard where you grew up. It goes in pencil and is inked on your third day there.
A rounded point, to ask OpenStreetMap for places nearby and the weather services for the weather. Your words, notes and home stay on the phone.
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.
Befriend a real tree. Every meeting is a ring: the friendship grows only from visits to the tree itself, and over a year they build up into a sawn cross-section.
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 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.
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