About this app

You will lose an hour to your phone today, and you will not remember any of it. STARE is for taking a little of that back. Press one button, set the phone down facing whatever you were looking at, and sit. Nothing will happen. That is not a fault — it is the entire design. Nothing is photographed while you sit. When the time is up, the phone takes one photograph of the view in front of it — the window, the room, the light where it has got to by then. Never you. That single picture is what you keep: not a record of the time, but what was there at the end of it. An ordinary window after ten minutes is stranger and better than you would expect, and it is not something you can fake or hurry. Nothing here is counted. There is no streak to protect, no score to raise, nobody to be better than. The only number in the app is how long you were not using it — and even that is not a target. It is just what happened. There is no course, no voice, no breathing to follow, no one telling you how you should feel. The app simply declines to be interesting for a few minutes. Whatever comes back in that gap comes back on its own. Your friends' sittings reach you only after you have done one yourself. Not as a punishment — as the point. There is nothing here to perform with, so nobody performs. The feed ends. Nothing is shown to you twice as though it were new. One notification a day, at a time you choose. The front camera is never used, and the app does not ask for it. These are not features. They are the shape of the thing. If one of them stops being true, the app is wrong. Terms of Use: https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/