Support

A stillness timer: you hold a finger on the glass for as long as your mind is quiet, and lift the moment a thought arrives. If something isn’t working, start here — and if the answer isn’t on this page, write to us.

The hold

My lap ended and I never lifted my finger

There is no tolerance and no debounce anywhere in the app: a lift of one millisecond ends a lap exactly as a lift of one minute does. That is deliberate — the gesture is your statement about your own mind, and the app does not second-guess it. A grace window would make every number it shows a guess.

What does not end a lap is movement. Your finger may slide, roll, drift, or re-seat itself anywhere on the screen for the whole hold; only full separation from the glass counts. Two things that do end one and can surprise you: iOS cancelling the touch when a system alert or an incoming call takes over the screen, and the narrow strip along the very top of the display, which belongs to iOS rather than to the app — a finger resting only there never registers.

Nothing happens when I put a finger down

In two thumbs mode the clock needs two points of contact and one finger opens nothing at all. Coming the other way, either thumb lifting ends the hold — you don’t have to lift both.

Check which mode you are in on the picker before the sitting, or in Settings → Sitting → Default mode.

END SESSION and SETTINGS don’t respond

Both go inert while a lap is running, and dim to show it. Lift first, and they work. It is a small rule with a large consequence: a sitting can only be ended between laps, so no lap is ever half-finished when one is saved, and a resting thumb can never end a sitting by accident.

My shortest laps aren’t in the summary

Settings → Sitting has two filters. Auto-delete zero-length laps is on by default — it drops the taps and brushes that aren’t really holds. Auto-delete laps shorter than a number of seconds you choose is off by default. Both apply at the moment you save, using the settings in effect then; a later change never reaches back into a sitting already saved.

The screen

The screen goes completely black while I hold

That’s the point of it. Once a lap has been running for the dim delay — eight seconds by default — the display drops to minimum brightness, and comes straight back the instant you lift, with your lap on it. Settings → Sitting turns Maximum dim off, or sets the delay to 4, 8 or 15 seconds.

Does my phone lock in the middle of a sitting?

No. Auto-lock is disabled for as long as you are in a sitting, so it cannot fire mid-hold, and it is handed back when you leave. If you would rather it didn’t, turn off Keep screen awake in Settings → Sitting.

The screen stayed dark after I left the app

It shouldn’t: brightness is restored on every lift, when you leave the sitting, and whenever the app stops being the thing in front of you — a call, Control Center, the app switcher. A screen this app darkened is never meant to be left dark. If you ever see one, that’s a bug worth writing to us about, with what you were doing at the time.

Swiping up doesn’t take me home

Also deliberate, and the single most important thing the app does to the system. Thumbs rest and slide near the bottom edge of the glass for half an hour at a time, so edge gestures are deferred during a sitting: the first swipe reveals the affordance instead of acting on it, and a second, deliberate swipe still leaves. Nobody leaves by accident, and anyone genuinely leaving can. The ordinary way out is END SESSION, between laps.

Cues

The phone buzzed while I was holding

Two things make it buzz, and nothing else does: passing your best lap of the day, and passing your best lap ever. Nothing fires when a lap starts or ends — a haptic on the lift would be the app commenting on a thought, which is the one thing it must not do. Turn them off, or change their style and strength, in Settings → Cues.

Why is there no sound?

There is none, anywhere in the app. No audio session is ever activated, so music, a podcast or a call is never ducked, paused or interrupted by thumbfulness. The whole premise is a quiet phone under a still hand.

History & sync

My sittings aren’t on my other device

Both devices need to be signed into the same Apple Account with iCloud on for thumbfulness. Syncing runs in the background, so give it a moment on a real connection.

The line under Settings → History says where this launch is keeping your sittings. When something is wrong with the store it says so in plain language and in red — that notice is exactly the thing to send us, because a device whose sync failed to configure looks identical to one that simply has nothing to pull yet.

Can I edit or delete a sitting?

Open it from Settings → History → View sitting history. The title and notes are editable and save as you type; there is no save button anywhere in this app. The laps themselves are not editable — they are the record of what actually happened, which is the only thing that makes the history worth keeping. Swipe a row to delete the whole sitting.

What if I never save a sitting?

Then nothing is written. DISCARD on the summary screen leaves no trace, and a sitting with no laps in it cannot be saved at all.

Tips

What does a tip get me?

Nothing, and that is the design rather than an oversight. thumbfulness is free and complete: no paywall, no gate, no trial, no account. A tip unlocks no feature, lifts no limit, hides no rung and changes nothing about how the app works. It is a way of saying thanks, and that is the whole of it. The jar lives at Settings → Support → Leave a tip and is reachable from nowhere else — it never asks.

Why is there no Restore Purchases button?

Because a tip is a consumable, not a possession. There is nothing to own, so there is nothing to restore or transfer to another device — and a Restore button that did nothing would be worse than saying so.

The tip screen says it isn’t reachable

It needs the App Store, which is the only part of thumbfulness that touches a network at all. Everything else — sittings, history, progress — works exactly as well offline.

Managing or refunding

Tips are one-time purchases with the payment method already on your Apple Account; there is no subscription and nothing that renews. Refunds are Apple’s to give — request one at reportaproblem.apple.com.

Accessibility

One real limitation, said plainly rather than left for you to discover: the hold itself cannot be performed with VoiceOver or Switch Control running. A single finger on the glass is explore-by-touch, so it never reaches the surface that counts a lap. There is no way around it — the gesture is a hand held still on glass.

Everything else is fully accessible. Every screen scales with Dynamic Type up to the accessibility sizes, every control is labelled and at least 44 points, and the charts and history rows carry spoken summaries with durations read as durations rather than as digits. The sitting screen is a single VoiceOver element holding the running lap, the sitting so far, and both bests — and it never announces itself unasked, because a phone talking through a sitting is the thing this app exists not to do.

What the app can’t know

It cannot tell whether you were actually still. Only you can lift the finger, and the whole design rests on you doing it honestly. That makes every number here yours rather than a measurement of you — and a short lap is not a failure, it is an honest reading of a busy mind.

thumbfulness is a timer, not a medical device and not a therapy. Nothing in it diagnoses, treats, or cures any condition, and it never replaces advice from a qualified clinician. If sitting quietly with your own attention is distressing rather than restful, that is worth talking to someone about, and stopping is always the right move.

Asking for something

A setting that would fit, a language you would like the app in, an iPad version, something about a screen that reads wrong — write to us. Requests from people who actually sit with the app are how the list gets ordered.