Bonsai Focus: Heartwood

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  Heartwood app icon — original 1024 × 1024, uncropped

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  Japanese maple garden — Heartwood 1.0.1, 1179 × 2556, no device frame

Inspiration

Heartwood began with a simple question: what if putting your phone down gave you something meaningful to come back to?

It is a small daily ritual for digital wellbeing. Choose one thing that deserves your attention, step away from the screen, and return to a bonsai shaped by the time you gave it. The goal is a calmer relationship with technology and a tangible reminder that small, consistent acts of care matter.

Mental wellbeing is central to that idea. Heartwood creates a place for intentional focus, a walking break, and a quiet moment of tending a tree. It is designed to support everyday habits and reflection; it does not diagnose or treat mental health conditions.

What it does

Choose a focus session, set your phone down, and return to a garden that grows with your completed time. Japanese maples and junipers develop through eleven artwork stages, with foliage that follows the seasons. Water, fertilize, prune, and style your tree, then save a focus film of its progress.

Optional Garden Walk sessions connect the same ritual to movement. Optional Screen Time app blocking helps protect the time you choose for yourself. The garden gives that time a lasting, personal record.

Core focus sessions and self-directed app blocking are free. The free garden has room for one tree. Heartwood Pro adds more room to grow and 4K, watermark-free focus films. RevenueCat handles subscription offerings, purchases, restoration, and Pro entitlement updates.

How it is built

Heartwood is a native iPhone app built with Swift and SwiftUI. SwiftData stores the garden and its history on device. Optional Apple Health access reads steps and walking speed for movement rewards and Garden Walk verification. Screen Time blocking works on device. No Heartwood account is required.

Design and challenges

The bonsai is the main record of attention. Warm paper colors, ink-like typography, seasonal foliage, and a quiet focus screen make the experience feel like tending a small living space.

Keeping a tree believable across growth stages, seasons, care actions, saved snapshots, and exported films was a central challenge. Maple leaf texture, pale mature bark, surface roots, and juniper deadwood all had to remain coherent as the tree changed. Another challenge was connecting subscriptions to dependable access while keeping the free focus ritual useful on its own.

What we learned

A wellness intention needs to show up in the interactions, not only in the description. A clear start, a quiet session, and a meaningful return to the garden give the experience its shape. Small visual details matter too: soil coverage and root placement can change whether the tree feels grounded and cared for.

Testing the actual purchase configuration also matters. We now verify that the signed release build can load the live RevenueCat offering before distributing it.

Shipaton release and demo

Heartwood first launched publicly on September 12, 2026. Version 1.0.1 is available on the US App Store. The attached demo is a real iPhone screen recording of version 1.0.2 (Build 33), available in internal TestFlight and submitted to Apple for review. It shows watering, focus controls, app blocking, Pro plans, inventory, tree shaping, and a focus-film export.

For the Design Award, please look at the patient visual progression and the relationship between focus and care. For the Peace Prize, the intended benefit is everyday digital wellbeing: making space for attention, movement, and a gentler daily routine.

Built With

• revenuecat
• swift