Cairn vs Jottle

You make the promise. Cairn helps you keep it. Cairn blocks the apps that pull you away, and you decide in advance how hard it is to get back in. Not a dashboard, not a report on how bad last week was. A commitment device. THE UNLOCK LADDER Every block has a price you set when you're clear-headed, and pay when you're not: • Confirm: one tap to say you mean it. • Cooldown: wait it out, then a short window. • Effort: a puzzle, a long passphrase, or ten pushups. • In stone: no way through. It opens when it was always going to open. The top rung is only offered where a block ends on its own: a schedule that closes, a daily limit that resets, a place you can walk out of. A hard block that never lifts isn't a commitment, it's a trap with app deletion as the only key, so Cairn won't offer it. The same price applies to every way out. Turning a block off, deleting it, and editing it all cost what opening it costs. A lock you can undo by flipping a switch isn't a lock. FOUR WAYS TO BLOCK • Hard block: on until you turn it off. • Scheduled: a window on the days you choose. • Daily limit: after 30, 60, or 120 minutes, it closes for the day. • At a place: holds while you're at the gym, the office, or any set location. Plus Focus sessions and a Vacation mode that stands everything down. THE TRAIL One stone for each day you keep every block. Seven stones make a week. Cairn counts the day you resisted, not just the day you slipped, and a day it can't be sure about stays blank rather than being awarded to you. A quiet day under your limit earns its stone like any other. WE CAN'T SEE A THING Cairn has no account, no servers, and no analytics. Not "we don't sell your data"; there is no data. You pick apps in Apple's own Screen Time picker, and Cairn only ever receives an anonymous token. It can't read which apps you chose. Neither can we. If you set a daily limit, iOS counts the minutes on your device and tells Cairn only that a limit was crossed. Never how long, never which app. PAY ONCE One payment. No subscription, no ads, no upsell. Free for a month first, and when the month ends nothing is held hostage: every block you made is still there, and nothing on your phone stays blocked because you didn't pay. WHAT CAIRN WON'T DO It won't stop you deleting it. That's deliberate. iOS lets you remove any app, and a blocker that pretended otherwise would be lying. Cairn is a commitment device, not a cage. Pair it with iOS Screen Time restrictions if you want that door closed too. Be where you are.

Jottle is for the thought you need to get down before it's gone. Open it and there's a blank line, waiting. Type the thought, tap Add Note, and get on with your day. There's nothing to set up and nothing to file. A note is a piece of plain text with a date on it. The first line becomes the title. That's the whole model, and it's why capture takes a second instead of a minute. EACH DEVICE GETS ITS OWN SHAPE • iPhone: the list and the editor, and nothing between you and the blank line • iPad: your notes on the left and a full page for writing on the right • Apple Watch: a real app, not a mirror. Dictate or scribble from your wrist. It syncs straight from iCloud, so it works with your phone out of range • Mac: Jottle is there too, as a notepad that drops in over whatever you're doing with one keystroke Notes sync through your own iCloud account. There's no Jottle account, no sign-in, and no server of ours in the middle. WIDGETS AND COMPLICATIONS Pin the notes that matter and they show up in the Pinned Notes widget, small, medium or large, on the Home Screen, the Lock Screen or in Notification Center. On the watch, put New Note on your face to dictate with one tap, or Recent Notes to read your latest at a glance. LOCKED NOTES, ACTUALLY LOCKED Lock any note and its body is encrypted with AES-256-GCM under a passphrase only you know, derived with PBKDF2-SHA256 at 600,000 iterations. Only the ciphertext is stored and only the ciphertext syncs, so a locked note is unreadable everywhere except on a device where you've entered the passphrase. Face ID or Touch ID unlocks it after the first time, and an open locked note is hidden from the app switcher. There's no recovery and no backdoor. Forget the passphrase and the note is gone for good. That's not an oversight. It's the feature. PLAIN TEXT, NOT A TRAP Export one note or all of them as ordinary Markdown files, with the dates kept in the front matter. Import a folder of them back. They open in any editor and are already covered by whatever backup you run. You are never locked in. THE REST OF IT Pin a note to keep it at the top. Archive one to get it out of the way without deleting it. Search across everything, or find within the note you're editing. MAKE IT YOURS Eight accent colors, light or dark, on a Paper or Bright background, and a text size your eyes agree with. Your watch keeps a color of its own. FREE Jottle on iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch is free, with every feature. The Mac app is a separate choice: a free 14-day trial, then a one-time purchase. WHAT IT DOESN'T DO No account. No subscription. No analytics, no advertising, no crash reporting, no third-party SDKs of any kind. Jottle makes no network requests of its own. The only thing it talks to is your iCloud, at your instruction. Nothing about you or your notes is collected, because there is nothing in it to collect them with. Requires iOS or iPadOS 26. The Apple Watch app requires watchOS 26. Syncing needs an Apple Account signed in with iCloud Drive on. Without one, Jottle runs perfectly well on a single device and tells you plainly that it isn't syncing.