Wildergarden: Grow Off-Screen

Every other app on your phone is built to keep you looking at it. This one is built to be closed.

Wildergarden is a valley that only grows while your phone is down. Grass first, then the flowers that follow grass, then the bees that follow the flowers. Clear water, then caddisflies, then trout, then the heron that will only stay while the water is clean. Forty species arrive in a dependency web, the way a real place recovers, and they arrive out of the hours you did not spend scrolling.

HOW IT WORKS, HONESTLY

Wildergarden cannot see your other apps. It does not ask for usage access, and it has no way to know what you opened or for how long. Instead you set a line, in minutes a day, and once a day you write down the truth. Read the number off your phone's own screen time dashboard, type it in, and the valley takes you at your word. That limitation is the whole reason the privacy promise on this page is worth anything.

Under your line, the valley grows. Over it, colour drains from the two ends of the hillside. There is also an optional stillness timer for when you want to feel it happening: start it when you put the phone down, and long evening stretches count for more than lunchtime ones.

BLIGHT IS HONEST, AND SURVIVABLE

A bad day greys the edges. It does not burn the place down. Grace covers the first slip every week without any damage, because everybody has one, and two clean days undo the worst day you can have. That ratio is deliberate. Species that leave keep their first arrival date in the field guide, and they come back.

FORTY SPECIES, FOUR BIOMES

The Meadow, Brookside, Old Forest and The Ridge open along the valley as stillness gathers. Every species has a hand written naturalist's note and an arrival date recorded like a birder's life list. The red fox needs three clean days running. The tawny owl wants three long still evenings inside one week. One species asks for a whole day with the feeds untouched, and most people never see it.

A WEEK, WRITTEN UP

The almanac writes up every week as nature writing, with the one number that matters underneath it, and a hedgerow of stems showing the last twelve weeks at a glance. Photo mode draws your valley in any of six lights, from first light to full dark, as a card you can keep. It shows what grew, never what you lost.

THE PLEDGE

No subscription. A subscription to help you use your phone less is a conflict of interest, so there is not one. All four biomes and all forty species are in the app you install.
No advertising, no advertising ID, no analytics, no crash reporter.
No account. Nothing to sign up for and nothing left on a server when you leave.
No internet permission. Android will not let this app open a network connection at all, which you can check in the permission list on this listing. The app also opts out of Android cloud backup and device transfer, so the ledger is not copied off the phone by the system either.
No surveillance. It never reads which apps you use.
One notification, at a time you choose, to close the day. Nothing in the app is designed to pull you back in.

WHAT IT WILL NOT DO

It will not block anything. Blockers get uninstalled in a weak moment, which makes them a bad place to put the whole design. It will not shame you: no red numbers, no broken chains, no streak you can lose forever. And it is not a treatment. Wildergarden is a wellbeing toy with an honest mechanic, and it is not a substitute for help with a compulsion that is hurting you.

Free, complete, and quietly on your side.