I built Slow Bloom because I wanted an app that didn't want anything from me.
Every meditation or wellness app I tried eventually turned into another thing competing for my attention: streaks, notifications, the whole retention playbook. I wanted something that just... existed.
What It Is
Slow Bloom is a meditative garden for iOS. You tap to gather light and grow flora that evolves through phases, from moss on stone to something stranger. Sessions are two to five minutes, maybe less.
There are six flora types, each with their own visual character and a small poetic trace I wrote for them. It shifts from active tapping to passive growth. The soundscape is pentatonic chimes and low drones (I spent more time on this than I probably should have). Haptics are subtle enough that you barely notice them. By the end, the numbers fade from the screen.
The app doesn't care whether you come back in an hour or a month. Your garden keeps growing either way.
iPhone screenshots
What It Isn't
This isn't an idle clicker dressed up in pastels. It was built around a simple principle: peace over pressure. A meditation app should be structurally incapable of becoming a compulsion machine.
That means no analytics infrastructure, no notification system (not even an optional one), no retention mechanics, no daily rewards, no streaks, and no third-party SDKs. The app talks to Apple's frameworks and nothing else.
The absence is the point.
The Technical Bit
Slow Bloom is built natively in Swift and SwiftUI. Metal shaders handle the particle system, pushing up to 500 particles at 120fps on ProMotion displays. Audio is synthesized in-app with LFO modulation and prime-length buffers to reduce repetition artifacts (this was one of those rabbit holes that took longer than the rest of the audio system combined). Flora is positioned along a golden-ratio spiral. Persistence uses SwiftData. The one-time in-app purchase uses StoreKit 2. Sync is optional via CloudKit.
Zero external dependencies.
One Purchase, No Subscriptions
The free version is the complete game. A single $4.99 in-app purchase, Eternal Bloom, extends it with the highest flora tier, cosmic visual themes, and optional iCloud sync. It opens up the late game but doesn't gate what's already there. The purchase is there if you want to support the work and see everything the garden can do.
Slow Bloom on the App Store (iPhone, iOS 16+)