RIPEN is a habit tracker where the record is a tree. One tree, grown from the days you keep, and it cannot be edited afterwards.
A list of checkboxes forgets. You clear it, and by Friday there is nothing to look at — no shape, no weight, no proof that March happened. A tree keeps all of it: the branch is as long as the days you lived it, the wood is as thick as the work, and the ground under it holds every day you let go.
You do not track tasks here. You name who you are becoming — takes care of my body, reads, keeps the house — and the habits that prove it grow on that limb.
Sixty-six is a landmark, not a promise. It is the median from the UCL study on how long a repeated action takes to become automatic; the range there runs from eighteen days to two hundred fifty-four. Your own number is your own.
There is no account and no sign-up, nothing is analysed, and we have no copy of your tree. Three things can leave the phone — a public page, a picture, a copy for a new phone — and each one waits for you to ask.
The whole of it is on its own page, in the same words the app uses.
Because there is no account, the only proof that a tree is yours is a phrase of words the app gives you. It claims the public address, and it is the key to the copy that moves the tree to a new phone. Keep it somewhere outside the app. If it is lost, it is lost — and with the copy that is not a policy but arithmetic: the phrase is the key, and we never had it.
What does not move with the tree: the pin, because it belongs to the phone, and anything you paid for, because it belongs to your App Store or Google account. Sign in to the new phone with the same one and restore purchases there.
Growing a tree is free: one limb with everything on it. One payment, once, unlocks a second limb and up to four, the time machine, and sound that keeps playing after you leave the app. There is no subscription and there never will be — a record of your own life should not stop working when a card expires.
Two things are sold separately and cosmetic: choosing a different shape for the tree, and sweeping the fallen leaves into the soil. Both are bought once and yours after that. Neither changes a single day of the record.
RIPEN is an app: iPhone and Android. There is no browser version and there will not be one — a tree you keep for years should live on your device, not in a tab that a cleared cache can empty.
The App Store and Google Play builds are on their way. This page carries the links the day they are live. The tree you can see on the front page is a demonstration, not an account.
The type is Geist Mono by Vercel, under the SIL Open Font License 1.1; the licence travels inside the app with the font. The icons are Tabler Icons by Paweł Kuna, under the MIT licence, redrawn to the hairline weight the rest of the app is drawn in.
Most of what you hear is field recordings from freesound.org, released by their authors under CC0 — no attribution asked for, which is exactly why it is given here. The winds, the rain and the thunder are made for the app and exist nowhere else. One author asked for a line even under CC0, and it is the least we can do: “Respect” by Misterbates.
Built with Flutter, and SoLoud for sound. Both are open source.
The sentence the whole app rests on — that a habit is not something you do but someone you become — is from “Atomic Habits” by James Clear. Sixty-six days comes from Lally, van Jaarsveld, Potts and Wardle, “How are habits formed”, University College London, 2009.
Anton Kozionov, a product designer and product manager. He built RIPEN because every habit tracker he tried looked like a spreadsheet that was disappointed in him, and he wanted one that grows a tree instead.
Write to hello@ripen.day — bugs, questions, or a tree that stopped making sense. There is no ticket system; the mail goes to the person who built it.