Warqa vs Halo

Warqa is a handwriting-first journal and notes app built for iPad. Pick up your Apple Pencil and start writing — everything else just happens. WRITE NATURALLY The canvas is the app. No modes, no switches. Ink flows immediately when your Pencil touches the page. Choose from blank, lined, dotted, or grid paper. Flip between pages with a natural page-curl gesture.

Most Pomodoro apps go silent between beeps. Halo doesn't. Pick brown noise, pink noise, or rain, and the sound follows every focus block. When the break starts, it fades. When the next block begins, it comes back. That's the difference. WHAT'S INSIDE A Pomodoro timer with your own focus, short-break, and long-break lengths. Auto-start the next phase or step through manually. Skip or reset at any time. Three ambient beds bundled with the app, not streamed. Brown noise for heads-down work. Pink noise for reading. Rain for the last hour of the day. A completion sound picker too: Off, Default, Chime, Bell, Soft. Tag each session by subject. General, Calculus, Design, Reading, whatever you're on. See the week broken down per subject so you know where the hours actually went. A daily focus goal (2 hours out of the box, editable), a streak that counts consecutive days you hit it, a weekly bar chart, and all-time totals. ON YOUR HOME SCREEN A Live Activity and Dynamic Island keep the countdown on your Lock Screen while you switch apps. Home-screen widgets in four sizes: Today, Streak, Stats, and This week. Full light and dark mode, follows your system. English, Espanol, Francais. WHAT'S NOT INSIDE No account. No sign-in. No cloud. No analytics. No third-party SDKs. No ads. No tracking. Everything is stored on your device. Uninstall Halo and the data goes with it. Settings has a Reset all data button if you want to wipe it without deleting the app. The only permission Halo asks for is notifications, so it can tell you when a session ends. It also uses Live Activities and Background App Refresh so the countdown stays accurate. No camera, microphone, photos, contacts, calendar, location, HealthKit, or motion access, ever. Halo works fully offline. There is no network call in the app. Free. That's the whole story.