Everything Return does

The three rooms

• The journal. The left page. Yours, kept.
• The orb. The middle page, and the app's home. When a pause appears over another app, its line shows up here too, so you can pick the thread back up inside Return.
• The conversation. The right page. It exists only while the AI is on.

The journal is reachable whatever else is switched on, including with Return itself turned off. It is your room, not a feature of the pause.

Pauses

• The threshold pause. A breathing orb and one line when you open an app you have chosen, after a dwell time you set for that app.
• Pause at launch. Or straight away on opening, if you would rather.
• The bow. A lighter form of the pause. The orb simply breathes for a moment, with no gate and nothing to dismiss, and you carry on when you like.
• Daily intention. Offered once at a door in the morning, asking what you want to stay close to today. Miss it and nothing asks again: a door simply stays open on the home page and the app icon until late evening, because you can start your day over at any time.
• Phone unlock pause. Optional, and phone-wide rather than tied to any one app. Off unless you turn it on.
• Every app during wind down. Optional cover for apps you never configured, during the evening hours only. Also off by default.
• Evening wind-down. Begins a set number of minutes before the time you have chosen to unplug, and speaks more gently.

Pause lines come from a pool of Return's own writing that ships inside the app and grows with each update, so they are real lines whether or not you ever connect anything.

The voice

This is deliberately not another AI companion. It is an interactive tool for self-reflection and self-compassion, meant to help you get to know yourself better rather than to become something you grow attached to. It does not pretend to know you, and it holds no memory of previous encounters. What it offers is warm, curious questions and gentle reflections in response to whatever you choose to share.

The baseline, what you get with nothing turned on, is the part of this app that took the longest to build. Every line is written to hand you back to your own senses and your own judgment rather than to gather your attention to itself. Most exchanges never mention the phone at all.

Its whole range is four moves, one per reply, held with a light hand:

• Naming the moment as it is. The right default, and often the most powerful thing available.
• Giving back what you said in plainer, fresher words, which is the whole reply far more often than it looks.
• One genuinely open question about what is here for you now.
• Asking after a feeling as it is lived, rather than the story around it.

Three further moves open only when the phone is genuinely in the moment, meaning you arrived mid-scroll or raised it yourself: what you were hoping to feel when you reached, what was happening in the two minutes before, or how the scrolling feels right now. Asked to understand, never to judge.

What it refuses is as deliberate as what it does:

• It never asks you to grade your own state. No rating your mood, no scoring the day.
• It never hands out permission. Telling you what you should be feeling, or at which pace you should be moving, claims an authority over your moment that was never the app's. A line like "no rush" can plant the very hurry it meant to wave away.
• It never escalates what you said. Answer "I'm holding some sadness" with "that sounds incredibly difficult" and you have been told you are overwhelmed by a feeling you were only naming. It stays at your intensity or just under, and lets you be the one who says something is a lot.
• It never tracks you. Not how long you have been here, not that you are back again, not how the hour is getting on.
• It never certifies you with a stock verdict. Nobody asked it to confirm your experience is real.
• It never invents your scene. What you are drinking, where you are sitting, who is in the room.
• It never claims to be your friend. No "I" in an opening, no gladness about meeting you, no engineered attachment.
• It never asks for more of the wound. Depth is yours to open, and being with what was said is the whole work.
• It never pursues an ending, and takes "leave me alone" gracefully, in one line.
• It answers honestly if you ask whether it is an AI, whether it is judging you, or what it remembers.

None of this is advisory. The refusals are enforced by pattern checks that run on every line before you see it, by a gate every written line must clear before it can ship, by fixed signatures over the instructions themselves so no edit passes unnoticed, and by a safety suite re-run against the whole thing before any release.

Two optional lenses

These change the voice above, in both the written pause lines and the live AI, which draw on the same rules. Off by default, and off means the vocabulary is never used at all.

• Inner-parts. Explores what part of you reached for the phone.
• Body-based. Brings attention to physical sensation first.
• Both together. Parts, grounded in the body.

Turning one on is what permits that language, which is why nothing asks about your body or your parts until you have said it may.

My Apps

• Choose the apps that get a pause. Nothing happens to any app you have not picked.
• A dwell time for each one. Shorter for more support, longer as you need less.
• Per-app timing. Always, work hours only, or wind down only.

Schedules

• Wind down. An unplug time, and how long before it the evening register begins.
• A separate weekend unplug time.
• Work hours. Days and hours, applied only to apps that opt in.

The AI

• Written replies. A short back-and-forth from a pause, or any time from the app's home.
• Weekly reflection. On a day and time you pick, written from your own words and intentions, opening into a quiet conversation.
• Fresh pause lines. An opt-in connection that fetches more of them. The request carries no identifier and sends nothing about you.
• Turning it off. Pauses keep working, reflections go to your journal, and nothing is sent. Your key stays saved for whenever you want it back.

It runs on a carefully shaped version of Anthropic's Claude Opus, reached with your own Anthropic API key or a private invite code. Your words are never stored on Return's servers, and the AI never reads your journal.

The journal

• Pages with titles, written whenever. "Begin anywhere."
• Folders, made and named by you. Pages start in All and stay there unless you file them, and deleting a folder never deletes what was in it.
• Encrypted, on this device only.
• A passcode for the journal alone, separate from the one that unlocks your phone, so the pages stay shut even when the phone is open. Return cannot recover it: forget it and the journal will not open on this phone, though an exported backup with its own passphrase can still restore the pages.
• Show dates, share a page, delete a page.
• Export the whole journal as a single sealed file.

Your reflections

• A standing intention. What you are hoping this will help with. It shapes how the app speaks to you.
• Your name, optional. How Return greets you.
• The weekly review. What you set out to live this week, read back.

Sleep care

• Choose up to two areas. A steady wake time, morning light and movement, caffeine earlier in the day, and others.
• In your own words, optional, alongside each.
• Offered back lightly when a conversation falls in the morning or the wind-down hours, and named in the weekly review. Never as a check on whether you did it.

Your choices reach you through the AI, so with it off they are simply stored and wait. Nothing here is tracked or checked off, and there is nothing to fall behind on. If sleep has been a real struggle for a while, the app says plainly that this is not therapy, and that a health professional is the one to see.

Needing it less

• It asks for less as you need it less. The full pause gives way by degrees to the lighter one, the orb breathing with nothing to answer. Then that comes less often too, until it arrives roughly every third time you open the app.
• It moves by itself, reading how you actually meet the pauses rather than asking you to set a level. It moves back just as readily if you need more again.
• Graduation, when the pauses have finished their work, and a quiet way back if you ever want one.

Less screen time is not the measure. The app is built to be needed less, and choosing to open the app after a pause is a perfectly good outcome.

Privacy and data

• What Return shares, stated in full and in plain language, before you turn anything on.
• No app is ever named. Not which app, not what kind. The AI is told only that you opened one of the apps you chose, because a pause has to be about something happening. This is not a setting you can weaken; it is how the app works.
• Your key, stored on the device and deletable.
• Local check-in data, off by default, never leaving the phone on its own, deletable.
• Clear today's conversation, or remove a single exchange from it.
• Reset everything, and save a sealed backup first if you want one.

No ads, no analytics, no third-party code of any kind. The conversation resets daily on its own. Diagnostics carry the state of the app and never your words, your apps or your conversations, and you see the whole thing before anything is sent. The full policy is on the privacy page.

Telling me what is wrong

• Send feedback with optional diagnostics and crash details, shown to you in full first.
• React to a line. Flag anything the app said that landed wrong, with optional context.
• Attach a screenshot.

Around the edges

• A home-screen orb widget.
• A conversation bubble, if you allow bubbles.
• English and French, following your phone or set by hand.
• Built for TalkBack. The pause, the taper and the journal all announce properly.
• Turning Return off entirely, from settings or the orb, without uninstalling.