Drift

A small, gentle iOS app for noticing the time between hits.

Free for 2h 33m. The cloud spirit's eyes get bigger and the sky fills with sparkles the longer you've drifted. No shame, no streaks, no nag. Just a gentle visual reward for the time you didn't reach for it.

Drift is an iOS app for tracking vaping (or any small repeated habit you'd like to notice more clearly). It started as a personal Scriptable prototype and was rebuilt as a native SwiftUI app for iOS 26, now live on the App Store.

What it is

A gentle tracker that visualizes the time between hits (the drift) as a cloud spirit. Log a hit and the spirit drops to baseline-sad. The longer the drift, the bigger the spirit's eyes get and the more sparkles fill the sky around it. There are no streaks to break, no fire emojis counting up, no shame for logging. It's a present-tense, neutral view of right now, the kind of mirror you'd want from a kindly friend, not a fitness app.

The design tries hard to celebrate without judging. False praise is worse than no praise, so notifications stay quiet during your sleep window; better to say nothing than to congratulate a gap you spent asleep. The spirit's growth is continuous, not stepwise: no plateaus, no levels, no "earn this badge." Just real-time visualization of one ratio: current drift ÷ rolling-average drift.

Features

• One-tap logging. Bind the Action Button to "Log a hit in Drift": silent, works on the Lock Screen, lands the hit and updates the widget in under a second. Also works from Shortcuts, Siri, Spotlight, and the trailing + tab.
• Dashboard. Today's sessions, average drift, your longest drifts, when cravings tend to hit, and a rolling average of how the drift is stretching over time.
• History. Month calendar with donut day cells. Tap a day to see per-day stats and individual hits. Edit or delete any hit.
• Notifications. Local-only, three kinds (immediate confirmation, beating-your-average, beating-your-record), each with its own toggle and timing offset. They stay quiet during your sleep window, so a gap you spent asleep is never celebrated.
• Cloud sky. Drifting clouds in light mode, twinkling stars + a dark cloud in dark mode. The ambient layer runs underneath the dashboard so the surface always feels alive.
• Export your data. Settings → Data → "export hits" writes every logged hit to a JSON file. Save it anywhere (Files, iCloud Drive, email) and own your data outright.
• Sessions or individual hits. Toggleable. Sessions collapse rapid hits within a configurable threshold; off treats every tap as its own event.

Screenshots

_{Onboarding · the daily dashboard · long-stretch mode (a week free) · charts · history}

Privacy

Drift declares "Data Not Collected" on the App Store, and that's accurate.

• All hit data lives on your device via SwiftData.
• No analytics SDKs, no third-party crash reporting, no servers we operate.
• Notifications are scheduled locally and delivered by Apple's notification system.
• iCloud sync routes through your own private iCloud account via CloudKit, never anywhere we can see. It's on by default (it's your own database); disable it per-app in iOS Settings → iCloud.

Full policy: Privacy.md.

Status

v1 is live on the App Store (submitted 2026-05-24, approved + released 2026-05-28). The native rebuild shipped everything: the dashboard, the spirit + sparkle field, the ambient cloud/star layer, App Intent logging, notifications, hit history, the full settings tab, the app icon, the onboarding carousel, the baseline empty-state, long-stretch mode (days/weeks/months free), always-on iCloud sync, and the data-migration safeguards. The Scriptable prototype is still in daily personal use as the system continues to bake.

Active v1.x backlog: chart refinements (tap-to-inspect, scrollable time-series, label/subtitle pass, smarter y-axis bounds) in Issues/23, and a first-milestone donut at the bottom of the home dashboard filling toward 1 day free in Issues/24. Portfolio packaging (this README as a designed artifact, plus a case study) is ongoing alongside. See Issues/ for the full backlog.

Built with

• SwiftUI + SwiftData on iOS 26
• App Intents for the Action Button / Lock Screen / Shortcuts logging surface
• WidgetKit for the Home Screen widget
• Charts for the dashboard's stretching/rolling-average plots
• Canvas + TimelineView for the spirit, sparkle field, and ambient cloud/star layer

iOS 26 is the deployment floor. Lower targets aren't planned.

Building from source

git clone https://github.com/kilo-studio/drift.git
cd drift
open app/Drift/Drift.xcodeproj

Then in Xcode:

• Scheme: Drift
• Destination: an iOS 26 simulator (e.g. iPhone 17 Pro) or a real device on iOS 26+
• ⌘R

The widget extension is set up but only renders a display-only timeline for now; silent tap-to-log from the widget is deferred. Signing uses your personal team for development. App Group group.studio.kilo.drift is required for the widget bridge. Xcode handles this automatically with automatic signing in most cases.

The prototype-data import bundle (Resources/vape-log-bundle.json) is gitignored; the app no-ops PrototypeMigration if it isn't present, so first-launch on a clean clone just gives you an empty store.

Project structure

Drift/
├── README.md                 ← you are here
├── Privacy.md                ← privacy policy
├── LICENSE                   ← MIT
├── Design/                   ← philosophy, the spirit, design system
├── Engineering/              ← architecture, data model, notifications, migration
├── Issues/                   ← per-feature work items with status frontmatter
├── prototype/                ← Scriptable prototype source + docs
└── app/Drift/                ← Xcode project
    └── Drift/
        ├── App/              ← SwiftUI views, LogHitIntent, NotificationScheduler
        ├── Data/             ← Hit, Records, HitStore, metrics, migration plan
        ├── DesignSystem/     ← colors, fonts, gradients, the driftCard primitive
        ├── Fonts/            ← bundled Quicksand + Caveat variable fonts
        ├── Drift.icon        ← Icon Composer bundle
        └── Spirit/           ← SpiritView, SparkleField, AmbientLayer

Design philosophy

If you're curious about the why behind the visual language, three docs are worth reading in order:

• Design/Philosophy.md: what Drift is and isn't, the streaks vs achievements vs visualization distinction
• Design/Spirit.md: the cloud character, continuous ratio model, eye scaling, sparkle field, milestones
• Design/Design system.md: colors, type, color logic

Contributing

This is a solo project right now and primarily a personal portfolio piece, but bug reports and small fixes are welcome. Big feature ideas are best discussed in an issue first since the app's quiet/no-nag stance means some kinds of features are explicitly out of scope (streak counters, social comparison, gamification).

When opening issues or PRs, please:

• Use the existing issue file naming convention (NN — Title.md with frontmatter) for proposals that match the project's planning style, or open a regular GitHub issue for bugs/questions.
• Match the existing code conventions: "hits" (never "puffs") for the unit, Drift's color tokens for any UI, no third-party dependencies without discussion.

License

MIT © Griffin Mullins.

Acknowledgments

• The cloud spirit's character is meant to feel soft, present, watchful, and never judgmental.
• The "no streak, no nag" stance was shaped by a lot of frustration with habit-tracker apps that turn every relapse into a graphic failure.
• Built with Claude Code as a pair-programming collaborator on the SwiftUI rebuild.

Contact

Email: griffin@kilo.studio