Life Tile
Passive time tracker that shows your day as a Mondrian grid
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Hi, I developed Life Tile for iPhone. It tracks your time passively and visualizes it as a Mondrian-style grid. It's a one-time purchase app with a 7-day trial.I was a user of a similar app named Life Cycle. Since the app hasn't been updated in a while, I tried to make a better app with my ideas and experiences. I used a big square timeline instead of a donut chart. And I added more useful views: tree-map, map, and list. You can use categorized activities with custom colors.The data never leaves a device. No account, No Server. It only supports data backup using iCloud. It was for privacy but it also makes the development easier. I added just one anonymous usage stat with TelemetryDeck. You can turn it off anytime.There were many technical difficulties. iOS location API (CLMonitor) is not 100% precise. And many difficult cases can't be handled automatically. For example, GPS blackout inside the subway, too many venues in a small region, and a huge location like an airport. So I improved many heuristics and tried my best for easy editing.Please check the App Store for the screenshots. Then you'll know why it's inspired by Mondrian.
HN · launched Jul 24, 2026 · 8 upvotes (top 54%) · 0 views
Niche: personal habit and activity tracking apps · 94 launches, 15 in the last 7 days ▲ +150% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Analytics & BI
- B2C
- Not AI
- Commercial product
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More like this: all 94 launches in personal habit and activity tracking apps →
Could you build this?
Partial While the Mondrian UI and treemaps are straightforward SwiftUI, power-efficient passive background geolocation and continuous place clustering on iOS is notoriously difficult.
What it would actually take: The app needs a native iOS stack utilizing CoreLocation, CoreMotion, HealthKit, and CoreData/SwiftData. The hard part is running background location tracking without quickly draining battery or being terminated by iOS watchdog limits, requiring sophisticated geofencing, visit monitoring (CLVisit), and spatial clustering algorithms (DBSCAN) to infer semantic places. This requires deep familiarity with iOS lifecycle constraints and sensor fusion power optimization.
Discussion
2 comments analyzed.
Feature requests: Android version
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 597 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #248 of 598 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 262 days after the earliest competitor.
- Replay: Life Timeline · ph · 2026-03-26 · 185 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- Drift: Daily Timeline · ph · 2026-10-22 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- Six years of running a period tracker app with no subscription, no ads · hn · 2026-08-05 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- PlanDial · ph · 2026-10-03 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- Runtile · ph · 2026-10-08 · 3 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- Dialed · hn · 2025-11-28 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- StrollTime · ph · 2026-10-14 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- LifeMuseum · ph · 2026-10-20 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.46
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