One thing at a time, taken to the extreme.

Open Herald and you see one thing: the proclamation whose hour comes next, set in giant serif numerals over its own colour wash, with the place and the absolute date beneath it.

The reckoning steps down as the hour approaches — whole days until less than a day is left, then hours, then minutes, then seconds. It is re-read every second and redrawn only when it has something new to say, so it is never a figure sitting still all morning.

When the hour passes, Herald advances to the next proclamation without asking and without lingering. You are never left looking at something that has already happened.

Herald is one vertical column, not a stack of screens. Create sits above the proclamation, the Ledger below it, the Decree below that. Pull toward a surface to open it, and back the way it came to put it away.

The finger owns the transition the whole way. The arriving surface is previewed live and scrubbed frame by frame, then handed to a real route the instant the pull commits — lift early and it falls back, carry it past the commit point and it lands.

Pull up and what follows arrives as a stacked deck of cards rather than a list. Reorder them, inspect them, or press and hold to keep one at the front regardless of its date — the thing you are actually thinking about is not always the soonest.

Pull the deck back down and the card under your thumb blooms out to fill the screen as the proclamation it is about to become, opening from the rectangle the card actually occupies. There is never a screen of bare colour between the card and the thing it became.

An hour that has passed is kept in Come To Pass for thirty days, then forgotten on its own.

A proclamation can be decreed to come back — ONCE, WEEKLY, MONTHLY, YEARLY. Birthdays, anniversaries, rent, renewals. The ledger never empties.

Every occurrence is measured from the instant originally decreed rather than from wherever the series was last left standing, so nothing drifts. A monthly thing set for the 31st returns on the 28th of February and then on the 31st of March; a 29 February returns on the 28th in common years and snaps back to the 29th in leap years.

It keeps its identity across the return, so a hold, a scheduled notification and a home screen widget all follow it through without being re-established.

The empty app is the hardest screen in a one-thing-at-a-time product: it asks you to type before it has shown you anything. A claim answers it with something you already own.

Herald reads the device calendar once, while the surface is open, and keeps no calendar row but the single event you claim. It never writes to the calendar, never watches it, holds no account, and sends nothing anywhere.

• One at a time, not a list. A list hands the choosing back to you, which is the work Herald exists to do for you. So it shows a single candidate, flooded in the colour it would wear, one tap before it becomes the proclamation.
• It says why. Under the title sits the strongest reason Herald can defend — DAYS SET ASIDE FOR IT, THE JOURNEY GIVES IT AWAY, IT COMES ROUND EVERY YEAR.
• It arrives dressed. 🎉 Ana and Sam wedding (Zoom) is claimed as Ana and Sam wedding. A postal address is proclaimed as its building. A Zoom link is no place at all.
• It refuses machinery. Hold, Focus time, Lunch and Busy stay refused. Routine cadence counts against a row.

The ranking is rules first. A bundled 41 KB, ten-class model reads title-only features entirely in Dart and entirely on device, and is allowed only a gated nudge among rows the rules already admitted — never to invent a proposal, and never to supply the reason line.

A herald reads a notice nailed to a board. Photograph one — a gig poster, a wedding invitation, a school letter — and Herald turns only what it can defend into an editable draft.

Text recognition runs on the device, through Apple's Vision framework and bundled ML Kit. No image and no recognised text is uploaded, and the disposable copy the system hands over is deleted the moment recognition finishes.

Dates are read conservatively. Month names and unambiguous four-digit dates are supported; a yearless 14 MAR means the next one still ahead. Prices, room numbers, 24/7, phone numbers and isolated years are refused rather than guessed at. Nothing is ever proclaimed automatically — every result lands in Create, still editable.

The point of holding one thing in front of you is that you should not have to open an app to be held to it.

• Home screen widgets, 2×2 and 4×2, built natively — SwiftUI and WidgetKit on iOS, Kotlin RemoteViews on Android.
• Lock screen accessories on iOS place the proclamation under the clock. Inside the last day the circular one becomes a ring: it says how much of the day is spent without needing a second line to say it in.
• Live Activity and Dynamic Island pin the countdown while the hour is near. On Android, a colour-flooded ongoing proclamation does the same job.
• “What's next in Herald” — asked of Siri, bound to the Action Button, or dropped into a Shortcuts automation. It answers without opening Herald, because opening the app to be told one sentence would defeat the point of asking.

The widgets are handed instants rather than baked countdowns, so the numeral falls and the queue moves on whether or not Herald is ever opened. Closed for a fortnight, it still answers with the proclamation that is genuinely next.

Sharing a proclamation composes it on its own fixed 9:16 canvas at 1080×1920 — a purpose-built object rather than a screenshot. No header controls, no status bar, square corners.

You see it before it is sent, and sending is a button rather than a gesture: it is outward and irreversible, and a pull is the wrong commitment for that. Your description is deliberately left out — it is the most personal line you write, and a poster you can send without weighing that up is a poster you will actually send.

One rule governs how ceremonially Herald addresses you, and it carries everywhere at once: the proclamation, the notification, the widget, and the sentence Siri says out loud.

Try the three voices

The rest of the Decree governs how early you are told (MORNING, HOUR, or BOTH), how far the widget's reckoning may step down (DAYS, HOURS, LIVE), whether the lock screen is taken, and — on Android — whether the wallpaper is flooded in the held proclamation's colour.

Herald has no account, no server and no analytics. There is no backend to upload your proclamations to, so they are never uploaded. The developer cannot see what you write, cannot see your calendar, and does not know you installed it.

The calendar grant is read-only and asked for only at the moment of a claim. Camera and photo library are asked for only when you choose that source. Notifications are scheduled locally by the operating system — there is no push service, no notification server and no device token.

For the App Store nutrition label and Google Play's Data safety form, Herald declares no data collected and no data shared. The full detail is in the privacy policy.