Fermata
Mark a moment. Hold your iPhone for one, three or five minutes. Fermata reads how steady the phone was while you held it and draws that reading as a field of light: a band with a hard bright edge when you were steady, the same light with no edge anywhere when you were not.
Made on your iPhone, by the phone's own motion sensor and a renderer we wrote. No permission prompt of any kind. No account, no server, no network.
There is no number anywhere in Fermata. No percentage, no grade, no verdict. The difference between a steady minute and a scattered one is edged or not edged, a property you can read in greyscale, upside down, from across a room. Underneath the picture each reading carries one plain word, still, settling, drifting or scattering, and the minutes it took.
Set the phone on a table and it will not score you well. It will decline to score you at all. If the motion trace says the phone was resting on something rather than held, the minute closes as not read, no reading is invented, and the moment still takes its place in your record. An instrument that refuses is worth more than one that guesses.
There is no home screen and no separate history. Your readings are dated full-bleed slices of the app’s own light, stacked newest first, separated by bands of ground that carry the dates. Your newest reading is not on another screen — it is the top slice, drawn tall. Scroll and it settles into the stack and takes its place among the others.
The latest reading sits on your Home Screen widget, on the Lock Screen accessory and on StandBy. Widgets show a still picture, because that is what iOS renders there, and we will not sell you motion the system does not pay for. What survives the Lock Screen's monochrome render is the structure of the reading, which is the part that carries the information anyway.
The field is drawn by a Metal shader we wrote, running on your device's GPU. Apple Intelligence, where the hardware has it, writes a single line of text under a reading and nothing else; where it is absent, a built-in table writes the same line and the app is identical in every other respect. There is no Private Cloud Compute and no cloud model of any kind. It works in Airplane Mode. Please check.
Free is complete in kind: the full picture at full fidelity, a real widget and a real share card. It is limited in rate and depth: one hold a day, two field styles, seven days of record. Fermata Premium is $4.99 monthly, $39.99 a year with a 7-day free trial for new subscribers, or a one-time $89.99 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.