HRV Breathe - Breathwork

Inspiration

Every breathing app promises calm and asks you to take it on faith. Heart rate variability is the one signal your own devices already record that responds to slow breathing, so I built the app around showing it to you instead of scoring you.

What it does

Five techniques, each for something different: Resonance, Box, 4-7-8, Extended Exhale and Cyclic Sighing. On Apple Watch, a session streams your heart rate and shows it rising on the inhale and falling on the exhale, live, as recorded, never interpreted. A guided resonance finder steps you from 7.0 down to 5.0 breaths per minute and shows the heart-rate swing at each pace, so you choose the pace that is actually yours. Four multi-day programs (HRV Bootcamp, Sleep Wind-Down, Morning Activation, Gentle Start), the physiological sigh, a BOLT breath-hold timer, widgets, Siri, a Live Activity, and Pocket Mode, which paces you through haptics alone so the phone stays in your pocket. The full Watch app works offline.

How we built it

SwiftUI on iOS and watchOS. HealthKit reads HRV as recorded by the user's own devices, the workout session behind the live pulse display is always discarded, and writing Mindful Minutes or State of Mind back to Health is opt-in and off by default. There is no account anywhere: sessions sync through the user's own iCloud. Monetization is one 7-day free trial in front of monthly, annual or lifetime, all through the RevenueCat SDK.

Challenges we ran into

Showing a live heart-rate swing honestly took restraint: no smoothing, no scores, no invented coherence metrics, just the number as the Watch records it. The first week on the App Store was its own lesson: real users found the session ring animating in reverse and the haptics too subtle, and 1.0.1 shipped those fixes within days.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Shipped 1.0 on September 8 and 1.0.1 inside the first week, built from the first users' feedback. The first free trials started within days of the paywall going live, including an annual trial in week one.

What's next

Resonance-pace recommendations drawn from session history, and richer Watch complications.

Built With

• cloudkit
• healthkit
• revenuecat
• swift
• swiftui
• watchos