The big ideas

A few simple ideas hold all of Yappie together. Once they click, everything else in the app makes sense. Here's the mental model, one idea at a time.

Focus sessions

A focus session is a stretch of time you set aside to concentrate. Choose a length, press Start, and a ring fills as the time passes.

Sessions run from 1 to 90 minutes and start out at 25. Breaks run from 1 to 30 and start out at 5. The clock lives in the background, so it keeps counting while the window is hidden or you're on another tab.

When a session ends, Yappie offers a break. It never starts one for you, and it never starts the next focus for you either. (Group focus rooms can also be timeless, counting up rather than down, but that's a room setting rather than something a solo session does.)

See Focus sessions for the full details.

Today and Tomorrow

Yappie keeps two small lists of intentions, the little tasks you'd like to focus on.

• Today is your live list for right now.
• Tomorrow is for planning ahead without pressure.

You can break any intention into smaller steps, on your own or with optional AI help, so a big task feels approachable. The order you drag things into stays on the machine you're sitting at. The tasks themselves sync; their arrangement doesn't.

The trust model

Yappie trusts you, and that shapes how growth works.

• Completing a task with a time on it credits your pet's growth even if you never ran the timer. If you did the work away from the app, say so and it counts.
• Focus you really did is never destroyed. Stopping a session early, a crash, un-ticking a task the timer completed, deleting that task, or editing its logged time downward all move those minutes into Unsorted focus rather than deleting them. They're still counted, only no longer attached to anything.
• Time you only typed in as an estimate does come off again when you untick it, because it never happened on a clock.

You're never punished for stopping. Life happens, and your effort still counts.

Growth in five aspects

Your pet grows across five aspects, each tied to a real part of a balanced life:

• Mind: time spent focusing.
• Body: movement and rest.
• Discipline: showing up and doing the work, day after day.
• Bond: days spent together with Yappie.
• Social: real time with the people you love.

Growth rises fastest when these aspects stay balanced, rather than pushing any single one to the limit. Over time your pet gains an overall level and climbs a ladder of eleven astronomy tiers, from Spark to Eternal, which you can walk through on the Journey page.

Rest is a first-class idea

Rest isn't the absence of Yappie, it's part of it. Logging a break, a walk or time with someone feeds Body and Social. Declaring a day off in Time off keeps your streak safe, quiets the app, pauses your recurring tasks and draws a calm rest day on your charts instead of a hole.

Local-first and private

Yappie works as a guest with no account at all, and nothing leaves your device unless you sign in and turn on cloud sync. Optional AI stays off until you enable it, and the social privacy grid opens narrow: friends and private groups see most of it, public groups see almost nothing, and every cell is yours to change.

Wellbeing and calm social

Two optional layers round things out, both entirely up to you:

• Wellbeing: gentle reminders to drink water, rest your eyes, breathe, fix your posture or stand up. All off by default.
• Calm social: friends, cheers, one-on-one co-focus, study groups with their drawn study rooms, and focusing beside a stranger who happens to be working right now. None of it is behind a paid plan.

Keep these ideas in mind and the rest of Yappie will feel familiar. Next, head to Get Yappie to install it and sign in.