千羽 · Senba for iPhone

A thousand folds.One wish.

Senba is a journal that hands things back. Write down what you are working toward, then answer one small prompt a day: eight seconds of voice, one photo, one line. Each answer is a fold.

Weeks later it returns one to you, set against the goal you wrote down, as evidence you are further along than you feel.

Coming to the App Store

See how it works

Everything stays on your device · No account

The Senba Today screen: today's fold asks you to record the sound of your practice, with a fifteen-second constraint and a Begin the fold button.

Fold. Keep. Return.

Senba is built on one loop. It is small enough to do on a bad day and it compounds into something you cannot argue with.

Fold

A prompt arrives with the form already chosen. Eight seconds of voice. One photo. One line. Fifteen seconds of the room you are sitting in.

Keep

Everything you capture is filed quietly against six threads: what you did, what you want, what scares you, how you are, what moved you, what you are getting better at.

Return

Weeks later, Senba hands a piece back. Your own voice, from before you knew how it turned out. Not a quote from a stranger. Yours.

The app picks the form.
You just answer.

The failure mode of every journal is a blank page and a standing order. Senba removes both. A constraint is easier to act on than an open field, and more fun.

Voice

Hold the dial, say it out loud, let go. The keystone: hearing your own past voice lands harder than reading it.

8 seconds · one take

Photo

One frame of whatever the prompt is pointing at. No filters, no second try.

one frame · no filters

One line

Finish the sentence. A hard character cap keeps you from overthinking it.

140 characters

Ambient

Fifteen seconds of wherever you are. The sound of a room is a better time capsule than a description of it.

15 seconds

The voice capture screen with a large tape-reel record dial reading hold to fold. — Voice · hold to fold

Recording: the dial turns terracotta, a neon countdown arc unwinds, and a live waveform moves below. — Let go to stop

A captured six-second voice note with a play button and its waveform. — Captured

The one-line capture screen with a neon caret and a 140-character limit. — One line

The photo capture viewfinder with corner reticles and the prompt what caught your eye. — Photo · one frame

The ambient sound capture screen with a level meter and a fifteen-second budget. — Ambient · fifteen seconds

Senba keeps the receipts.

Belief does not come from being told you are great. It comes from your own track record. So the app spends most of its effort on giving that record back to you at the right moment.

“Eleven weeks ago, you said this. Listen to it again.”

A callback is one of your own artifacts, resurfaced. The picker is deliberately not random: once something has surfaced it goes quiet for a while, and selection leans toward the old and the never-seen. The best callback is the one you had half-forgotten.

Sometimes it arrives as a voice note with a waveform. Sometimes as a slip of paper with a line you wrote. Sometimes as a photograph you took and forgot to look at again.

A voice callback: eleven weeks ago you said, followed by a large quote and a play button with your recording. — A callback, months into the practice

Cooldown, not shuffle

Once a fold has been surfaced it becomes ineligible for a while. True randomness over a small archive repeats constantly. This does not.

Weighted toward the old

Resurfacing yesterday is a status update. Resurfacing three months ago is an excavation. Senba biases toward the second one.

Same thread, different door

To show progress it does not repeat an old prompt. It plays the old artifact, then asks something new that pulls the same thread.

The weld: a stated goal, a neon line, a past voice note offered as proof, and today's dare. — The weld, once there is proof to weld

The weld · rare

Your own past, entered as evidence.

Now and then Senba finds a piece of your archive that is genuine proof you have moved toward something you said you wanted. It welds the two together and adds a dare for today.

This is the whole reason the app exists, so it is rationed. Roughly once a week, never on demand. If it happened daily it would stop landing.

The flock is the point.

From senbazuru, the thousand folded paper cranes traditionally completed to carry a wish. Each capture is one crane. The archive is the flock. There is no streak to break and nothing to lose if you miss a day, only cranes you have already folded.

247 / 1000

Folds, and counting · the wish

Browse it as the flock, as a stream, as your sparks shelf, or as the wins you have already closed. Search it. Pin a piece to your Lock Screen. It is a record, not a leaderboard.

And when something strikes you between folds, catch it. Sparks land on their own shelf, outside the daily ritual, so an idea at 11pm does not have to wait for tomorrow's prompt.

The senbazuru archive: 247 of 1000 folds shown as a grid of small paper cranes tinted by thread. — The flock after 247 folds

Catch an inspiration: choose a line of text, a voice note or a photo. — Catch an inspiration

The sparks shelf: caught lines listed with how long ago each was saved. — The sparks shelf

The same sparks shelf in night mode. — Sparks at night

A goal with its next steps listed, each with a focus action. — A goal and its steps

Three horizons, and the next small step.

You set three goals when you start: something small and near, something that takes weeks, and the big one. They are the first things Senba hands back to you, and they never get buried.

Unfold a goal

Ask for the next small step and get a handful of concrete ones. Take one now, save one for later, or write your own.

Focus, then proof

Start a step and it waits for you on Today and on your Lock Screen. Finish it and the step becomes a fold in your archive: evidence, not a checkbox.

On your Lock Screen

Pin a goal, a step, or a caught spark to a widget. The thing you said mattered stays in front of you instead of behind an app icon.

Setting your wish: three horizon fields for next month, this season and this year. — Set your wish

The Goals screen: three goals, one for each horizon, next month, this season and this year. — Three horizons

Unfolding a goal into small suggested next steps, with options for different ones or writing your own. — Unfold a step

Now focusing on a step, with a note that it is waiting on your lock screen. — Now focusing

The Today screen with the day's fold kept and a focusing-now card offering I did it. — Back on Today

A short walkthrough for adding the Senba widget to your Lock Screen. — Let it wait with you

The Senba welcome screen with the terracotta crane crest and the line a thousand folds, one wish. — Welcome

The onboarding screen explaining fold, keep and return. — How it works

The Today screen in night mode, warm ink rather than cold black. — Paper by day, ink by night

Settings: appearance, optional iCloud sync, the supporter unlock, and fold reminders. — Settings

On your device. Full stop.

Senba asks you for the most private material you have: your voice, your fears, the thing you actually want. That only works if none of it leaves your phone. So none of it does.

No account, ever. No sign-up, no email, no password. Open the app and start.
No servers of our own. There is nowhere for your folds to be uploaded to, because there is nothing to upload them to.
Transcription runs on the phone. Voice notes are transcribed on-device so they can be searched and resurfaced. The audio is never sent anywhere.
The intelligence is on-device too. Prompt wording and step suggestions use Apple's on-device model. Photos are described on-device. No cloud model reads your entries.
iCloud sync is optional and it is yours. Turn it on and folds sync through your own private iCloud, which the developer has no access to. Leave it off and nothing ever leaves the device.
No analytics, no tracking, no ads. No third-party SDKs of any kind. Nobody is counting your taps.

Read the privacy policy

Free. There is no catch to find.

Free

The whole app. Every capture type, every callback, the weld, the full archive, the widgets. Nothing is held back behind a subscription and there is no trial that ends.

If Senba earns a place in your day, there is a single optional one-time purchase that unlocks supporter status and nothing else. That is the entire business model.