One small suggestion, actively shifting your attention to a place with more meaning. Offered at a moment when you are free to act on it.
Most apps targeting phone habits work by subtraction. They block, they lock, they count what you've lost, and they let you know they're disappointed.
They mostly don't work, and it isn't a failure of willpower. A blocked phone or a scolding leaves you holding the same restless minute, with nothing offered in its place.
That minute can be more. It is enough time to tell your sister you were thinking about her. Enough to ask your father that question you keep meaning to ask. Enough to show appreciation to your partner … for something that you would otherwise let pass.
These minutes can add meaning to your life and to the lives of those you care about. That is ReChannel's purpose.
You tell ReChannel, once, about the handful of people who matter to you — who they are, what they're carrying right now, what you'd never want to be careless about. It takes a few minutes and it stays on your phone.
After that, ReChannel reaches you a few times a day with one specific thing you could do. Not "connect more." Something like:
"Ask Christian how the pottery class is going — he was nervous about the first one."
You do it, or you don't. If this isn't the moment, dismiss it - temporarily or for good. Zero obligation, zero nagging.
A reminder at the wrong moment is just another interruption. ReChannel puts real work into when it speaks.
You tell it the times you're most likely to be scrolling or otherwise free, and the times it must never interrupt — dinner, bedtime, the meeting you cannot be looking at your phone in. Beyond that it learns. It notices when you actually respond and gently shifts toward them.
You set how often it may speak, from once a day to as much as you like. Once is a perfectly good answer.
Redirections are not ReChannel's only feature. ReChannel activates three different kinds of attention, at three different times of day.
A specific suggestion offered at a moment when you may be free to act on it. This is the core of the app.
One short reflection to start the day, drawn from a library of principles about how attention, gratitude and perspective actually work. Not affirmations. Closer to a good sentence you turn over during that first sip of coffee.
Three short beats before sleep, focusing on something good that already happened. Savoring a positive experience is one of the best-evidenced things you can do for your own wellbeing, and almost nobody does it on purpose. Embers aims to prompt this activity each night and it only takes ninety seconds.
The hard part of an app like this isn't the reminder. It's avoiding being insufferable.
ReChannel has rules it enforces on itself, before anything reaches you:
Nothing that trades on shame to get you to act. A suggestion that makes you feel worse has failed, even if you comply with it. Take a ReChannel or leave it. Period.
It won't write "tell her you miss her" — that's your sentence, not ours. It suggests the opening and gets out of the way.
It cannot invent a detail about someone in your life. If a suggestion mentions the pottery class, it's because you mentioned the pottery class.
No advice that amounts to looking good, winning, or coming out ahead of the people you love.
What you'd suggest to a parent of a four-year-old and a parent of a nineteen-year-old have almost nothing in common, and ReChannel treats them differently.
Every suggestion is checked against these principles before you see it. Ones that fail are discarded, and you get a simpler suggestion instead of a clever one.
Detail on the people in your life is the most personal information you have. So almost none of it leaves your phone.
Their names, numbers, birthdays, and everything you wrote about them stay on your device. When ReChannel needs help wording a suggestion, it strips the request down first: every real name becomes a meaningless one-time placeholder, dates become vague ranges, contact details are removed entirely, and your own name is never sent at all. Names are re-identified locally on your phone, AFTER your phone has received help on the suggestion.
There's no account required to use it. There's no profile of you on our server — we don't keep one. And you can delete everything, permanently, from inside the app in two taps.
The full detail is in the Privacy Policy, written to be read rather than to protect us.
Worth being clear, because we don't want to overclaim.
It is not therapy, and not a substitute for it. It's a nudge toward people you already love.
It is not a screen-time blocker. It won't lock you out of anything. It assumes you're an adult who can decide.
It does not measure your relationships. No scores on the people in your life, no rankings.
It does not read your messages, your contacts in the background, or anything you didn't type into it directly.
It will sometimes be wrong. A suggestion will land badly, or arrive at a genuinely terrible moment. Dismiss it. The app is built to be easy to ignore, which is a strange thing - and the right thing - to design for.
ReChannel is built on a handful of findings that are unusually well established and poorly served by other software.
Close relationships are the single strongest predictor of a life people describe as good — stronger than income, stronger than health. Attention is the currency of those relationships, and attention is precisely what other applications are engineered to take.
Noticing and marking someone else's good news does more for a relationship than supporting them through bad news. Deliberately savouring something that already happened raises wellbeing measurably. Small, frequent, low-stakes contact sustains a relationship better than rare grand gestures.
None of this is obscure. What's missing is something that shows up in the moment and makes it easy. That's the whole ReChannel design.
ReChannel is priced monthly, with a 14-day free trial. No ads, and nothing to sell — you're the customer, not the product.
Cancel any time in your App Store settings. If you cancel, you keep access through the period you've paid for.