Urge Surfer: Ride the Wave

Feel the pull? Open the app, name the urge, set a timer, and ride the wave. Most cravings pass in under five minutes. Private by design — nothing ever leaves your phone.

Cravings are waves. They rise, they peak, they pass. Urge Surfer teaches you to ride them out instead of fighting them.

Most quit-and-recovery apps shame you for feeling the urge — broken-streak alarms, red banners, guilt calendars. Urge Surfer does the opposite. When you feel the pull, you open the app, name the urge, set a timer, and ride the wave. Every craving has a half-life, usually under five minutes if you don't act on it. That's a mindfulness technique called urge surfing, and this app does one thing well: it helps you wait the wave out.

WHAT YOU CAN DO • Pick what you're surfing — 12 presets (cigarette, vape, alcohol, coffee, sugar, weed, social media, shopping, and more), or add your own. • Set a timer — 1, 3, 5, 10, or 15 minutes. Most waves pass before the bell. • Ride it out — an animated breathing circle guides a calming 4-7-8 cycle. Adjust the intensity slider mid-surf. The timer keeps running even if you background or force-quit the app. • Cave without shame — one tap logs it, asks what pulled you under (stress, boredom, habit, after a meal…), and offers a retry. No judgment. • Celebrate — capture a victory selfie with five overlay styles, save it to a private album, and s hare it if you want. • See your patterns — a heatmap by day and hour, your top triggers ranked, and a success rate for every urge. • Honest streaks — days since your last slip, not a fragile "log every day or lose it" counter. Silence never breaks your streak.

PRIVATE BY DESIGN No account. No sign-up. No backend. No analytics, no tracking, no ads. Everything — your name, you r urges, your logs, your photos — stays in your device's sandbox and never leaves it. The app does not call home.

FREE AND OPEN SOURCE Urge Surfer is free and fully open source under the AGPL-3.0 license. You can read every line, fil e an issue, or contribute.

Whatever you're trying to quit — cigarettes, vaping, alcohol, sugar, doomscrolling — the next wave is coming. Learn to surf it.

Urge Surfer is a self-help tool and is not a substitute for professional medical or mental-health care.