Moons: Keep in Touch

You know who you want to stay close to. You also know it has been longer than you meant since you spoke to some of them. Moons is a small app for the twelve people who matter most. You pick them from your contacts, give each one a rhythm — weekly, monthly, whatever fits — and they orbit you on a single screen. As time passes without contact they drift outward and their colour follows. One glance tells you who is due. That is the whole app. One screen, one loop, one payment. THE ORBIT Everyone fits on one screen. No list, no scrolling, no search. Green means you have just caught up, grey means drifting, terracotta means it has been a while. Pinch for a close-up when you want to see faces rather than positions. The twelve-person cap is deliberate. It is what removes tags, tiers, folders and pagination from the app, and it means adding a thirteenth person asks you a real question instead of quietly growing a database. If one circle is not enough — a client, a team, the school run — there is room for up to four groups, each its own orbit of twelve. Swipe sideways to spin from one to the next, or pinch in to see them all around you at once. LOGGING A CATCH-UP Tap someone and reach out — a call, FaceTime, a message, an email, WhatsApp. Moons opens the right app and logs the catch-up for you. Or press and hold to record one that happened somewhere else: over lunch, at the school gates, on a walk. There is an undo, and never a confirmation dialog. Arrive to find several people overdue and you get a grid of faces. Tap the ones you have seen. Five seconds to clear a fortnight. WHAT IT HOLDS Notes, facts and what you talked about last time, kept for each person. Birthdays and anniversaries come across from Contacts, and you can add any other date worth remembering — the day you met, a date you would rather not forget. Each gets a quiet nudge a week before. A reminder on the day someone is due, which you can switch off for anyone. When someone has drifted a very long way, Moons moves them out of the orbit rather than nagging you about it. One tap brings them back, or you can keep them without ever being prompted again — because the reason you have not called is not always one an app should push at. IT DOES NOT WATCH YOU Moons cannot read your messages, your calls or your email. No iPhone app can, and Moons does not pretend otherwise. It records that you chose to reach out, which is the part worth remembering anyway. Everything stays on your device. No account, no sign-up, no server, no analytics, no adverts. The privacy label reads "Data Not Collected" because that is literally true. NO STREAKS No scores. No leaderboards. No red badges on human beings. Missing someone by a few days is not a failure and the app will not treat it as one. ALSO INCLUDED A home-screen widget showing whichever group you choose, with a button that logs a catch-up for whoever is most overdue without opening the app. And a Siri shortcut: "Log a catch-up in Moons." PRICE Three people free, for as long as you like. One payment opens all twelve, for good. Another, if you want them, opens four groups. No subscription.