One app, five small instruments. Pick the one that fits the moment — a minute is enough.
Most mindfulness apps are one big program you have to commit to. SwissZen is the opposite: a pocket knife. Open it, unfold the one blade you need right now, close it again. The Home screen literally fans the tools out of a knife handle — and Swiss red is used for exactly one thing on every screen: the action that matters.
| Tool | What it does | |
|---|---|---|
| 🫁 | Breathe · Guided pace | A calm sphere that grows on the inhale and settles on the exhale. Box 4‑4‑4‑4, Calm 4‑7‑8, Coherent 5‑5; 2 / 5 / 10 minute sessions; pause exactly where you are. |
| ❄️ | Breathe · Wim Hof | Guided power‑breathing rounds in the style of the classic guided videos: fully in — let go, breath counter, empty‑lungs hold with a stopwatch and per‑round target, 15 s recovery breath, round summary. Four levels (below). |
| 🔔 | Bell | A real mindfulness bell that rings while the app is closed: random (15–90 min), fixed interval, or set times of day, with quiet hours. Tap I paused on the notification and add a note about what you noticed. |
| 🌿 | Practices | Five step‑by‑step micro‑practices (5‑4‑3‑2‑1 grounding, body scan, notice three things, start‑of‑day pause, gratitude minute) and five timed meditations of 5–20 min (breath anchor, loving‑kindness, mountain, walking, sleep wind‑down). |
| ✍️ | Journal | One line a day against a rotating prompt. Streak and week view, and an Echo — a line you wrote a few weeks ago, resurfaced. |
Home ties it together: today's minutes breathed, bells heard and lines written, your streak, and when you last used each tool.
| Level | Rounds | Breaths / round | Hold targets |
|---|---|---|---|
| Beginner | 3 | 30 | 0:30 → 1:00 → 1:30 |
| Medium · classic | 3 | 30–35 | 1:00 → 1:30 → 1:30–2:00 |
| Advanced | 4 | 35–40 | 1:00 → 1:30 → 2:00 → 2:30 |
| Expert | 4–5 | 40–50 | 1:30 → 2:00 → 2:30 → 3:00+ |
| Custom preset | 1–6 | 10–60 | your first-round target (0:15–5:00, default 1:00), then +0:30 per round up to round 5 |
The breathing tempo is the same for every level: 2.0 s in / 1.5 s out by default, adjustable in 0.1 s steps (0.5–4 s) right on the Wim Hof screen.
Each round: power breaths → last breath, let it all go → hold on empty lungs (open‑ended, you decide when to breathe in) → recovery breath held for 15 s → next round.
Warning
Always practice sitting or lying down. Never in or near water, never while driving. Breathing exercises are not medical treatment — if you have a heart condition, epilepsy, are pregnant or unsure, talk to a doctor first.
Every screen, practice and prompt is translated. Switch in Settings → Language (System / English / Русский) — on Android 13+ the app also appears in the system's per‑app language settings.
Settings → Appearance: System / Light / Dark. The dark theme keeps the pine‑and‑ice look on a deep green‑black ground.
Or grab the latest APK from Releases, or the debug APK attached to any CI run. Android 8.0 (API 26) or newer.
- Kotlin + Jetpack Compose, Material 3 with a custom design system (ivory
#F7F4EE, pine#1E4D3B, ice#DFECF2, Swiss red#E30613, Inter typeface). - Room for journal, bell history and session log · DataStore for settings.
- AlarmManager (
setAndAllowWhileIdle, no exact‑alarm permission) + notification channel with a custom chime for the bell; rescheduled on boot and time changes. - Synthesised breath audio — white noise through a sweeping band‑pass filter, rendered with
AudioTrack, so the sound always matches the breathing tempo. - The Wim Hof session is a pure‑Kotlin state machine (
breath/WimHof.kt) driven per frame, with unit tests for every level's timing. - Per‑app language via
AppCompatDelegate.setApplicationLocaleswith an auto‑generated locale config. - No accounts, no network, no analytics. Everything stays on the device.
app/src/main/java/app/swisszen/
├── breath/ Wim Hof engine + levels, guided-pace engine (pure Kotlin, unit-tested)
├── bell/ schedule logic (quiet hours), alarms, notification, boot receiver
├── audio/ breath-sound synth + bell chime
├── data/ Room database, DataStore settings
└── ui/ theme, components, home · breathe · bell · practices · journal · settings
Requirements: JDK 17+ (Android Studio's bundled JBR works) and the Android SDK.
git clone https://github.com/bigdevwhale/SwissZen.git
cd SwissZen
./gradlew testDebugUnitTest # unit tests
./gradlew assembleDebug # app/build/outputs/apk/debug/app-debug.apk
./gradlew installDebug # install on a connected device- Android CI (
.github/workflows/android.yml) — on every push and PR: unit tests, lint (missing translations fail the build), debug APK uploaded as an artifact. - Release (
.github/workflows/release.yml) — push a tag likev1.0.0(or run it manually) to build a signed release APK and AAB and publish them as a GitHub Release; the AAB is what goes to Google Play.
MIT · Inter typeface under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.