Why I took the alarm out of a breathing app

I live on Amami Oshima, an island about 380 km south of the Japanese mainland, where I run a small company. This September we started putting our own apps on the App Store. The second one is BREATHING. There is a candle on the screen, and you breathe with its flame. When the time you set is up, the flame goes out. No alarm sounds.

This is about that last sentence.

An alarm is a sound for waking you

Most breathing and meditation apps end with a sound. A chime, a bowl, a bell — an alarm, whatever it is dressed as. It is a reasonable design. You set a time, and something has to tell you when the time is up.

But a sound exists to be noticed. The moment it plays, your attention is pulled toward it. The more relaxed you have become, the harder you are pulled back: the frame you would normally brace with has loosened, and there is nothing to cushion the jolt. And there is a second effect, quieter than the first. You know the sound is coming. So for the second half of the session, some part of you is waiting for it. The sound that marks the end thins out the minutes before the end.

A temple bell is a different thing. It decays slowly, for so long that you cannot say when it stopped. A phone alarm keeps only the first instant of that and throws away the rest. It is an alarm clock's idea of a sound: something to wake you. You could say we have been putting a sound designed to wake you at the end of a time meant to settle you.

Let the end reach the skin, not the ear

BREATHING does not announce the end. The candle on the screen burns shorter over the time you chose. When the time is up, the flame goes out — quietly, at the end of an exhale. Smoke rises. The afterglow fades slowly. That is all.

Even with your eyes closed, you can tell through your eyelids that the light has changed. The end arrives through the skin, not the ear. You are not startled, and you never had to brace. You simply notice, at some point, that it is over.

What "no alarm" turned out to mean

Written down, it is one line: no alarm. Building it, it turned into a series of decisions.

Do not stop at the exact second. If you set five minutes, the candle does not go out at 5:00. It waits for the end of the first exhale after the time is up. A flame that dies while you are breathing in feels cut off. A flame that dies as you finish breathing out does not. Five minutes ends up being 306 seconds. I am fine with that.

Take out the sound of the flame going out, too. In the first version there was a small hiss when the flame died — the sound a real candle makes. It seemed honest, and it seemed like a gentle enough marker. Then I sat with the test build for a while, breathing with it, and heard it. The hiss was tiny. But the moment it played, the stillness I had settled into started moving again. A line was drawn — here is where it was quiet, and here is where it stopped. That line was exactly what I was trying not to draw. I removed the hiss. BREATHING is now silent from beginning to end. The only markers are the smoke and the afterglow.

Do not go fully dark. After the flame is out, the screen dims over about forty-five seconds, but it never reaches black. A black screen is itself a sign that says "finished". A little light stays, and you open your eyes when you are ready.

Do not congratulate. There is no "5 minutes complete" and no streak. The flame going out already told you it was over. There is no need to say it again in numbers.

What I gave up

I should say plainly that BREATHING is not for everyone. If you need to be told, clearly, that your time is up, an app with an alarm will serve you better.

I also gave up knowing how the app is used. It makes no network connection, so no numbers come back to me. What I have instead are the people around me on the island who try it and tell me, directly, what they noticed.

The same rule, one version later

Last week we released version 1.1, which adds something that might sound like the opposite of all this: a breath scan. You rest a thumb on the screen and move it up as you breathe in, down as you breathe out. The flame follows your thumb. When you lift it, the app tells you what it saw — breaths per minute, and the seconds you spent breathing in, holding, breathing out, holding.

It measures, but it does not judge. There is no ideal number, no target, no "better than yesterday". It describes, and then it is quiet. The shape it measured can be sent to the candle as your own rhythm, and that is where the scan ends. It is the same rule as the alarm, applied to numbers: the app can show you something, but it should not tell you what to feel about it.

On endings

The candle does one thing from beginning to end: it gets shorter. It does not hurry you and it does not praise you. When the time is up, and you have breathed out, it goes out.

I built MEMOROLL to be used for years. BREATHING I hope for something different: that one day its user will no longer need it, and will put it down.

An ending does not have to be announced. It can simply be noticed. That is the ending I wanted to build.

BREATHING is free on the App Store, in Japanese and English. It was made by one developer on Amami Oshima, Japan. — https://resdev.jp/en/app/breathing/