Aether

Your centers of gravity, drawn.

Name up to three things that matter — a goal, a project, a person — and Aether renders them as a private field: a deep-space luminous density over a hairline substrate of concentric orbital rings. It lives on your Home Screen, your Lock Screen and StandBy.

Generated on your iPhone in milliseconds. Universal for iPhone and iPad. No account, no notifications, no server.

Thirty seconds, no typing

Setup is naming what you are carrying, tapping from a curated set or writing a short label, plus a two-tap energy control. Nothing is required to be typed. The field forms as a slow emergence, closer to a photograph developing than to a progress bar, and then it is yours.

Structure first, light second

The field is not a colour wash. Under the luminous flow sits a fine, almost technical drawing of concentric orbital rings and filaments, and that substrate is what survives everywhere the colour cannot: the Lock Screen renders accessory widgets in system monochrome, so what you see there is the structure of your field, legibly, rather than a shrunken blur.

It changes without you feeding it

A center of gravity you have not touched in a week visibly decays. The field advances along a pre-computed timeline through the day and settles overnight on StandBy. You come back to re-tune something you already saw a hundred times on your Lock Screen, not to file an entry. There are no charts, no trend lines, no weekly summary, and no list of what you typed.

Made on your iPhone

The field is drawn by a renderer we wrote, running in Metal on your device. Apple's on-device Foundation Models are used only to read optional short text into rendering parameters, on the hardware that has them; where they are absent, a deterministic mapping produces the same result and the experience is identical. There is no Private Cloud Compute and no cloud model of any kind. It works in airplane mode. Please check.

Private by construction

Pricing

Free is complete in kind: a real field, a real widget, a real share card, nothing watermarked on the widget, ever. It is limited in rate: one settling a day, three centers of gravity, two styles, fourteen days of history. Aether Premium is $4.99 monthly, $39.99 a year with a 7-day free trial for new subscribers, or a one-time $79.99 Lifetime purchase (family-shareable). Subscriptions auto-renew unless cancelled at least 24 hours before the period ends; manage them in Settings → Apple ID → Subscriptions. Restore purchases anytime.

Questions

Does Aether need an account?
No. There is no sign-up, no login, and no Sign in with Apple. Restoring a purchase needs no account either.
Does it work offline?
Yes, entirely. Only the App Store needs a connection. Turn on airplane mode and use the whole app.
Do I need an Apple Intelligence iPhone?
No. Every iPhone on iOS 26 draws the field with the built-in renderer. Apple Intelligence, where present, only reads your words into parameters. The field, the widgets, StandBy, history and sharing are the same either way.
Is this a journal or a health app?
No. Aether is a visual instrument. It shows no charts, no trends and no insight reports, it does not measure or interpret a mental state, and it makes no health, therapy or diagnosis claims.
Can Aether set my phone background automatically?
No, and no app can: iOS has no API for it. Aether renders the field at your device resolution, saves it to Photos when you ask, and walks you through the three steps to set it yourself.
Which widgets does it support?
Home Screen widgets in small, medium, large and extra large, the rectangular and circular Lock Screen accessories, and StandBy. Free shows your current field on every widget you place; Premium adds the full family set, per-widget configuration, and pinning any saved field.