Questions, including the hostile ones

What is it, in one paragraph?

An iOS app for two people living together. It holds a list of the household's tasks, lets the two of you say who does each one, and reads back two splits — the doing and the carrying — each set against what your own hours suggest. It is an instrument, not a chore app: there is no to-do list, nothing to tick off, and no reminders.

Is this going to be used against me?

It is the right question and it shaped the whole design. Some specifics:

• Both people can edit everything, and delete anything, with undo. If one partner could score and the other couldn't, it would be a weapon.
• The app never labels a person. What it describes is the household's split, not either of you.
• There is no total to wave. No screen quotes a score for you or for your partner.
• No red and green on a split, anywhere, ever.
• It never ends on a verdict. Where something could move, it shows what; where a split is already close to its reference, it says so in a line, with no praise.

If you are in a relationship where a measurement would be turned against you, no app is the answer to that, and this one does not pretend to be.

Does it think an even split is fair?

No, and it has no way of saying so. What it expects of each of you is derived from your own hours and commitments, and an even split is drawn only as a reference mark. The capacity model is the whole argument, including the bits of it that are guesses.

What does it collect about us?

Nothing. No account, no login, no cloud, no analytics on anything about your relationship. The data lives on the device and nowhere else. That is also why it can be bought once instead of rented — a local-only app has no per-user cost to fund. The privacy page is short for the same reason.

The trade is real and worth knowing: no cloud backup means losing the phone loses the data. A real backup is on the list.

What does it cost?

Free to download, with a complete demo household you can poke at as much as you like. How keeping a household of your own is paid for is still being settled, and this page will say so plainly once it is. What is already fixed: no subscription and no ads.

Your partner never pays, on any device, on any platform. Charging the second partner would be the most efficient possible way of guaranteeing they never engage.

Why not a subscription?

Because a subscription needs the app to keep talking, and this app is designed to go quiet when a household's split is fine. Building a business out of monthly re-engagement, in a category whose documented failure is that the re-engagement always lands on the same person, would be building exactly the machine this is supposed to replace.

There is also a research reason: sustained tracked reciprocity between partners tends to erode, and may end up worse than doing nothing. The easiest thing to sell is the thing most likely to do harm.

Is there an Android version?

Not at the moment. iOS first, and whether an Android port happens will be decided on evidence once the app is in real use rather than promised now. The code is written so that the port stays affordable — the schema is the portable artefact, the calculation has no interface framework in it — but that is a precaution, not a commitment.

Does it work if my partner never engages?

Partly, and the app tells you which parts. A one-sided reading is still a reading of what one person believes, and it is labelled as that rather than dressed up as agreement. Getting the second partner to engage at all is the unsolved problem of this entire category, and nobody — including us — should claim to have cracked it.

Will it fix our division of labour?

Unknown, and we are not going to imply otherwise. No study anywhere shows that measuring a division of labour changes it. The best-known product in this category has exactly one published evaluation, with no comparison group. What this app can defensibly claim is that it measures something, and that it shows its working.

Who is behind it?

One person, building it slowly and in the open. About.