Branches

A gratitude tree, in ink

Coming to the App Store

Branches is a gratitude journal for iPhone and iPad. Each day you write down one good thing, a sentence or two. When you water it, the words wash into a single drop of water. The drop falls onto an ink-painted tree, and a leaf opens where it lands.

A year of those, and you have a tree made of everything you were grateful for.

What it does

Each leaf keeps its words and takes the colour of the month you wrote them. Tap a leaf and the words come back.
History lies beneath the ground: every entry, gathered by month. Edit one, let a leaf fall, or keep a copy of everything as plain text.
Milestones appear on the tree itself: a plum blossom on your tenth leaf, a persimmon after a year, and, once, a bird.
A red sun by day and a pale moon by night, following your phone’s light and dark mode.
An optional evening reminder. It skips any day you’ve already written and never mentions the days you didn’t.

Screenshots

Day one: a bare sapling under a red sun, with a thank-you typed on the writing line

The words gone, fallen as a single drop of water toward the sapling

A leaf circled on a young tree, its words from July shown at the top

The tree at night in dark mode, under a pale blue moon

History: October's entries listed by day, one line each

A year on: a full tree with leaves in every month's colour and a persimmon

No streaks

There are no streaks, badges, scores or settings screens. Nothing counts the days you missed. If you’re away for a month, the tree waits.

Your words stay on your device

There is no account, no sign-in and no cloud. Branches has no analytics and no networking code of its own, and it works with no signal at all. What you write is kept in the app’s private storage on your iPhone or iPad, and nowhere else.

Free, with a tip jar

Branches is free, with no ads and no subscriptions. At the foot of History, under “A small thank-you”, you can leave a tip of $1, $5, $10 or $20. A tip unlocks nothing; every part of the app is already yours.

Works with VoiceOver, Dynamic Type, Bold Text, Increase Contrast and Reduce Motion. Requires iOS 18 or later.

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