Silent Bell: Mindful Taps

The surprise that wakes your attention up.

Silent Bell taps your wrist at random moments — a mindfulness bell for Apple Watch, silent by default. It divides each hour into equal stretches and places one tap at random inside each, so there is no rhythm to learn and nothing to brace for. Every tap arrives unrehearsed: spaced far enough apart to never feel like an alarm, unpredictable enough to keep working. Each one is a small, private question — where is your attention right now?

SILENT BY DEFAULT, TRULY PRIVATE
No banner. Nothing on your watch face. Nothing in Notification Center. The people around you will never know — there is nothing to see. Just a gentle tap, felt only by you, even with your wrist down and the screen dark.

WORKS THROUGH EVERY FOCUS
Because the taps are not notifications, Do Not Disturb, Sleep and Work Focus cannot silence them. Your iPhone can be in another room, or off entirely — Silent Bell runs on the watch alone.

MADE TO GET OUT OF THE WAY
• 1 to 10 taps an hour, placed at random and never clustered
• A minimum gap, so two taps never land on top of each other
• Choose how the tap feels from eleven patterns. Tick, Double tick and Triple tick are always silent; the others only in Silent Mode.
• No account, no network, no analytics — there is no data to collect

AN HONEST NOTE
Apple limits how long any app may run in the background to one hour. When Silent Bell reaches that limit it pauses, gives you a distinct pattern you'll learn to recognise, and one tap resumes it. It is a platform limit rather than a choice, and it makes a fair bell of its own: once an hour you notice that the noticing stopped, and you choose to begin again.

REQUIRES
Apple Watch with watchOS 10 or later. There is no iPhone app to install.

The source code is public and auditable at github.com/jakublipinski/Silent-Bell — every line the app runs, readable by anyone.