Breathe: Breathing Exercises

Breathe is a breathing timer. It shows you a circle that grows and shrinks, the word for what to do, and the seconds left of it. That is the whole app. WHAT IT IS NOT It is not a medical device and does not diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any medical condition. Consult a healthcare professional for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. It makes no claim about your health. It does not measure you: no microphone, no camera, no sensors, nothing about your body ever enters it. It counts seconds and tells you when to change what you are doing, and everything it knows is what you typed. FOUR PATTERNS TO START WITH • Box — 4 in, 4 hold, 4 out, 4 hold. Equal all the way round, which is why it is the easiest one to follow. • 4-7-8 — 4 in, 7 hold, 8 out. The long one. • Coherent — five and a half seconds in, five and a half out, no holds. About five and a half breaths a minute. • Relax — 4 in, 6 out. A longer exhale than inhale, and nothing else. AND ANY PATTERN YOU WANT Set each of the four phases in half-second steps and give it a name. A hold may be zero; an inhale and an exhale may not, because a pattern without them is a timer rather than a way of breathing. Your patterns sit under the built-in ones and you can put them in whatever order you like. Every pattern, session length and feature is free. There is no paid version of this app and nothing at all is behind the video ad. WHY THE LENGTH IT SAYS IS NOT ALWAYS THE LENGTH YOU PICKED A session is a whole number of cycles, so it ends where a breath ends. Ask for five minutes of 4-7-8 and you get sixteen cycles, which is five minutes and four seconds — and the app says 5:04 rather than stopping you four seconds into a nineteen-second breath so a label can read 5:00. THE PART YOU CANNOT SEE Almost every timer of this shape keeps a phase and a countdown and subtracts from it on every frame. That goes wrong quietly: a dropped frame makes the session run long, backgrounding the app stops the count, and every error is permanent because each one is added to the next. Here there is no counter. Where you are is worked out from how long the session has been running, every time the screen draws. A stutter costs nothing. Leave the app and come back and it is exactly right on the first frame. WITH YOUR EYES SHUT A short buzz marks every phase change, so you can follow a pattern without looking at the phone — face down on a desk works. It can be switched off. The screen is kept awake for the length of a session and goes back to normal the moment you leave, and no wake-lock permission is asked for to do it. A screen reader announces the phase word when it changes, and only the word: a countdown read out loud once a second for five minutes would be unusable. WHAT IT REMEMBERS Every finished session, on the day you did it, with the pattern and the length. A current streak, a longest run, and totals. Nothing is written down for a session you stop early. The day a session belongs to is fixed when it happens, so flying somewhere else does not silently move weeks of your history onto different days. ONE OPTIONAL REMINDER Off unless you switch it on. Nothing is scheduled, no notification permission is asked for, and no channel is created until you do. It is one nudge a day at a time you choose, and it arrives on an inexact schedule — a reminder to sit down and breathe does not have to land on a particular second, so the app never asks for an exact-alarm permission. IT IS ALL ON THIS PHONE No account, no sign-up, no cloud, no sync, no server. Everything except the ads works in airplane mode. Uninstalling deletes your patterns and your history, and Save a copy is how you keep them: one file with everything in it, which is also how you move to a new phone. Five permissions. Two of them are for the ads that keep it free, one is what the ads SDK adds itself, and the last two exist only so the optional reminder can arrive and survive a restart.