← Kernwit

One thing, for a while.

A habit app about staying with something long enough to get somewhere. Not about doing more things — about doing one thing without picking up your phone.

Why it exists

If I can teach kids to stay on one thing for more than twenty minutes, we won. It's the short-form attention that's doing the damage. The whole brief, from a parent to a 14-year-old's app

That sentence decides the maths. The score pays for sustained attention, not for volume: your best unbroken stretch, not the sum of your day. Splitting your work can never beat sticking with it. An early version paid more for six five-minute sessions than for one clean half hour — a test caught it, and that was the bug worth catching.

What it does today

Small, and finished enough to use.

One thing at a timePick something, choose how long, sit with it. A companion keeps you company and celebrates when you stop.
Leaving is cheapStep away and it pauses and waits. Reading happens in pieces; that shouldn't cost you the session.
Friends, not a leaderboardYou see that a friend showed up, how they're feeling, and how their week went. Nothing is ranked, and XP measures effort against your own target — not against theirs.
Working togetherOpen a room and work at the same time. Everyone who does the distance earns the same, whether it took them one hour or three.
A line about it afterWrite a note when you finish, or don't. It's yours; nobody else can read it.
SoundOcean, rain and brown noise, made by the browser. No streaming, no account, works on a plane.
OfflineThe phone is the working copy. Sessions record with no signal at all.

What it doesn't do

The honest list.

No remindersIt won't nudge you, buzz you, or badge its icon. If you forget, it doesn't chase you.
No app storeIt's a web page you add to your home screen. There's a page in the app showing how, on both iPhone and Android.
No coach, no AIIt counts minutes and keeps your streak. It doesn't have opinions about your life.
No weight, no caloriesDeliberately absent. The wrong numbers to put in front of a teenager.
Not finishedIt's early. Things move, and some weeks it gets worse before it gets better.

Your data

What we hold, plainly.

Your habits, your sessions and your notes are backed up to our server, so losing a phone doesn't lose a month of work. We also hold your name, your email, and who your friends are.

Friends see much less than we do. They get your mood, whether you started or finished today, and your XP for the last seven days. Not what you're working on, not your notes, not your minutes — and that part is enforced in the database, with tests that try to break it. XP measures effort against your own target, so a friend's number says how their week went, not how you compare with them.

No ads and no trackers. One cookie, to keep you signed in. Sign-in is Google only, so there's no password of ours to leak.

Worth saying plainly: the backup isn't optional yet. There's no switch for keeping a habit off the server, or for hiding one from the backup. If that matters to you, it's a fair reason to wait.

Who it's by

A 14-year-old and his dad, for about ten friends.

He owns the product and the look; the code is his dad's. It's being built for his friends in Norway first, which is a small enough number to actually listen to. If it's useful to you too, good — but it isn't trying to be an app for everyone yet, and saying otherwise would be the first lie on this page.

It's free, and there is no billing in it at all. Not a trial, not a free tier — there's simply nothing to pay for and nothing built to take a payment. We're not going to pretend to know what happens if it ever gets big.

Try it

It takes about a minute.

Sign in with Google, add one habit, and sit with it for twenty minutes. That's the whole product.

Open Rutino

Works in any browser. Add it to your home screen and it behaves like an app.