GlowFox: Evening Wind-Down

You don't have to win the night. Build a short evening ritual in your own order, one lantern at a time, with no sleep score.

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Inspiration

Lumi the fox kept every lantern in the forest lit at once: unfinished work, screens, busy thoughts, tomorrow's plans. As night falls, she turns them down one by one, in a safe order. GlowFox is a bridge from day to night that doesn't turn sleep into a performance goal.

What it does

The Evening Ritual Studio is where you build the bridge:

  • choose a start time;
  • add your own steps, each with its own duration in minutes;
  • reorder the steps with up/down controls;
  • mark a step as "Applied" when you've done it.

The studio shows:

  • the number of chosen steps, the planned minutes and the marked steps;
  • a timeline where each step shows its start and end time. When a routine runs past midnight, the day change is shown correctly, so shift workers and late carers get a correct timeline.

A ritual can hold up to 8 steps. The studio never sets a device alarm. The app says, on screen: "Completion represents the performance of the ritual, not sleep quality or sleep stage."

The course: 12 short lessons in three chapters (Wind Down, Screen Sunset, Quiet Den). Topics include the evening as a bridge rather than a performance, a few doable steps, writing tomorrow down instead of solving it now, reading the clock after midnight, shift schedules, and starting again without penalty after a rough night.

Other features: 19 languages, search and bookmarks, and an optional calendar file or on-device reminder that you switch on yourself. No account is needed.

GlowFox is general self-help education about evening routines. It makes no promise about sleep and does not diagnose or treat any sleep disorder.

Free and Premium:

  • Free: the ritual studio and lessons 1–6, with small banner ads only.
  • GlowFox Premium: an auto-renewing subscription, monthly or annual. It unlocks lessons 7–12, the encrypted backup and the reminder/calendar export, and removes ads.
  • Free trial: both plans start with a 7-day free trial.

How we built it

  • App shell: an offline web app wrapped for Android with Capacitor.
  • Plugins: @revenuecat/purchases-capacitor, @capacitor-community/admob, @capacitor/local-notifications, @capacitor/filesystem, @capacitor/share, @capacitor/browser and @capacitor/app.
  • Ritual data: the ritual is stored on the device as ordered steps (label, minutes, position, applied flag).

RevenueCat

  • Entitlement: premium.
  • Offering: default, which is the current offering, with the packages $rc_monthly and $rc_annual.
  • Products: the packages map to glowfox_monthly:monthly and glowfox_yearly:yearly.
  • Trial: both base plans carry the Play offer trial7 (7 days free, ACTIVE).
  • Paywall: the paywall renders the store's own localized price and period.
  • Entitlement check: the app reads a fresh customer record once per process, so a grant or refund made outside the app is not hidden by a stale cache.

AdMob: stricter than our other apps

  • Interstitials: GlowFox's build config sets interstitialEnabled: false, so it has no full-screen ads at all.
  • Banner: the only ad is an adaptive banner. It appears only on the Home and Lessons screens, never in the ritual studio.
  • Consent: Google UMP consent comes first.
  • Premium: Premium removes the banner.

Build and verification

  • CI builds run in GitHub Actions; nothing is built locally.
  • The demo build was installed from Google Play (versionCode 1). Its web payload is identical, file for file (75 files), to the CI build of the uploaded bundle.

Challenges we ran into

  • Content hidden under the floating navigation. The bottom padding was a fixed 120 px. The navigation's real height changes with font scale, 19 languages, safe areas and the banner. "Add to ritual" could end up under the bar. The overlay now measures the navigation's real footprint (ResizeObserver plus viewport) and pads to that.
  • Irregular schedules. Night-shift and care schedules break the usual "evening" assumption, so the timeline marks the day change instead of assuming bedtime is before midnight.
  • Billing needs the store build. A side-loaded copy of the same code got "billing unavailable" from Google Play. The Play-installed build loads both plans and the trial.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • A sleep-adjacent app with no sleep score and no sleep-stage tracking.
  • A ritual timeline that stays correct past midnight.
  • An ad rule written around the user's evening: no interstitials at all.

What's next for GlowFox

Ideas from the product notes, not promises:

  • a night view that removes countdown pressure;
  • an optional morning self-report with no sleep measurement.

Judges' access

  • Free trial: open Settings (the top-right icon) and scroll to Premium. Choose either plan. Google Play shows a 7-day free trial, and cancelling before it ends means no charge.
  • What the trial unlocks: everything Premium includes.

  • Without the trial: the ritual studio and lessons 1–6 are free.

  • Recorded on a Turkish-locale phone: the Google Play sheet line "7 günlük ücretsiz deneme" means "7-day free trial"; prices appear in TRY; the file-picker button "Dosya Seç" means "Choose file". The app UI itself is in English.

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