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Life Tile

Passive time tracker that shows your day as a Mondrian grid

Details

External ID
49029788
Source
HN
Company
—
Product
Life Tile
Website domain
apple.com
Launched
July 24, 2026
Cohort
—
Upvotes
8
Upvotes percentile
0.46176821983273597
Tags
—
Fetched at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Updated at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.

Description

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.

Enrichment

Theme
Vertical
Horizontal
Function
Analytics & BI
Audience
B2C
AI stance
Not AI
Project type
Commercial product
Normalized one-liner
passive time tracker showing your day as a grid
Manually corrected
False

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 — 264 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #133 of 265 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 262 days after the earliest competitor.

Other launches for this product

Same idea, different domain

Nobody's really built a analytics & bi tool for Legal yet.