App Profile: Mindfulness Bell

palomnik

Rating: 5/5

“I just sit by the river selling water” - saying of some Zen master. The above phrase must have captured the imagination of a whole bunch of people who now sell mindfulness apps with ridiculous subscription prices. Those might be useful for beginners, but once you know how to meditate in a few different ways, you have it for life, and all you need is this app. This is the one to get for simplicity, but it is also highly configurable. For people who want to do the “Stop” exercise at random points, this one is also good. The only improvement might be to connect the app to log meditation time to the Apple Health app, which has a mindfulness log function. Otherwise this one is perfect in its Zen simplicity.

awakenwp

Rating: 2/5

Update: Only the timer element works anymore. App crashes whenever I try to use the primary feature, which is to have the bell sound at a repaying pattern (such as every hour). When I click “start” the app crashes and no bells chime throughout my day. The issue with “get support” remains unchanged. There’s no one to reach, apparently, to privately voice an issue - so apparently the only option is to complain publicly and hope someone reads this who can fix the issue. Not optimistic, unfortunately. * * * * * * * * * * * * * Unfortunately when I click “get support” it opens up the developers website to allow me to click what app of theirs I need support with, and when I click it it redirects me back to the App Store where my only other recourse is to leave a review. So here it is.. This would be a lovely experience except for the fact that the bells do not fade out naturally, it instead are abruptly cut off. I cannot see any setting on my end to allow the bell to resonate to its natural conclusion. The abrupt and premature cutoff of the bell completely undermines what would otherwise be a fabulous experience. I’ll update this review to reflect improvements if said improvements occur, or if I’m given guidance as to how to adjust something on my end to eliminate the issue. I have searched all options and don’t see how I could fix it via settings adjustments, but if I’m wrong, I’ll be glad to be proven so if it means I can fix the problem.

recoveringmale

Rating: 3/5

This app works well enough for what it is. I grabbed it primarily because it was one of the few apps I could find that offered bells at random intervals; while these do work fine, I wish the app would actually display the correct number of remaining bells as they progress. Example: If you set it to ring randomly twice an hour, beginning at 10am and stopping at 9pm, it'll show a list of upcoming bells which all simply read '-random bell-', and shows the remaining bell count at 22. But as the bells begin to go off, this list remains unchanged, and the remaining bell count stays locked at 22. In other words, no indication of progress at all. Again, this is a fairly minor issue considering they the app does what it's meant to do, but I wish they'd fix it so that the random bell times were actually displayed, and the remaining count kept accurate.