Drëmych

Drëmych is a free baby sleep tracker for iOS and Android. The first 30 days give full access to everything, no card. After that only the history depth and the advanced forecasts are limited a little, and you can keep using it as long as you like. There is no constant paywall.

Why it can take off. Almost every sleep tracker that actually helps sits behind a subscription: without paying there is nothing inside. But sleep is critical for a child’s health, and every family needs a routine, not only those ready to pay. My mission is to bring sleep tracking to everyone. Free, and so pleasant that you want to use it.

A parent logs sleep a dozen times a day, with one hand and half asleep. So everything works from the home screen and the widgets: tap play when the child falls asleep, tap pause when they wake up. You don’t have to open the app at all.

And the home screen is where Drëmych lives, a gnome in pyjamas. The scene follows the real time of day: dawn, morning, day, golden hour, dusk, night. Each phase has its own sky, light and gnome poses: in the morning he stretches, during the day he waters flowers, while the child sleeps he reads, and at night he sits with an owl and a lantern. At night the dark mode turns on by itself, so the screen doesn’t blind you in the nursery.

Under the timer there are hints: since when the child is awake and roughly when to put them down. The forecast learns the child over the first two weeks, and the modes adapt to the age: moving to three naps, a regression mode that turns on by itself and turns off a week later.

The home screen is a sleep disk: a timer, the day strip and the forecast. Swipe up for the whole day as a list. With Sleep+ the disk shows the full plan of the day, for free it shows the next sleep.

Logging a sleep wrong is normal, so editing has to be just as fast. The main way is right on the disk: drag the start and end handles, a delta shows above the handle, and a neighbouring sleep stops the handle and offers to merge. A sleep across midnight, editing at night, notes for a sleep, and a new past sleep by tapping the strip.

Rotate the phone and the home screen flows into the statistics wall: the gnome with a telescope on a stump and a date navigator. The sheet shows the day, week and month, and notices when a sleep was probably not logged. Past the free history there is a gentle way into Sleep+, not a wall.

The profile is the second wall: the gnome knits on a bench by a lantern. Here live the family (a second adult is free, invites by QR, link or code), the child’s card, height and weight with percentiles, the night schedule and notifications. Every sheet is drawn with all its edge cases: limits, signing in before an invite, account deletion with recovery, the night theme.

Sleep starts and stops from the lock screen, Live Activity, Dynamic Island and widgets on iOS, and from the notification shade and Glance widgets on Android. The first launch is four steps: hello, the child, notifications with widgets, inviting a partner.

A chat with Drëmych is planned. He will know everything about your child’s sleep, so you can ask him for advice.

I build it alone, from scratch, for iOS and Android at once. I have used the Android build myself for 2+ months, the iOS build is about 60% done. The mockups are a clean handoff for development: every frame has an annotation with mechanics, haptics, animations, edge cases and VoiceOver.