Frequently asked questions
Short answers to the things people ask most about Align — how to use it, how data is handled, and where the thinking comes from.
When a short answer is enough, the answer stays short.
How much time does it take in a day?
The flow is designed as three touches — morning, daytime, evening — each in the range of 30 seconds to 1 minute. Two to three minutes total. Text input is optional, so you can align the three points by tapping alone. Keeping the app from feeling “heavy” is a priority, so a day where you want to write at length and a day where you want to keep it very short are both received the same way.
What happens on a day that doesn’t align?
A day where the three points didn’t align is still kept as a log. It doesn’t add to the alignment rate, but the record of “a day you observed” stays unbroken. Align’s main signal is not consecutive days but the alignment rate, so missing one day won’t reset the number — it only dips gently.
Where is the data stored?
Everything is stored locally on your device. Nothing is sent to a server, and there is no collection of behavior logs or analytics. No account is needed either, so on the development side there is simply no mechanism to know who entered what. Privacy is protected by the design itself — by not collecting data — rather than by policy text.
Do I need to register an account?
You don’t. You can start using it the moment you open the app. No email, no password is asked for. Not creating an account is itself one of Align’s design decisions.
Can I still use it with notifications off?
It works fine. Notifications are only an aid; Align’s core experience does not depend on them. Opening the app at your own pace and aligning the three points is the assumed default. If anything, opening it quietly on your own time sits better with the spirit of the app than opening it because a notification chased you. Even with notifications off — just opening the icon as part of a morning routine — works well enough.
Can I migrate from another habit tracker?
Data import is not provided in the MVP. Streaks and history built up in other trackers cannot be carried over directly. This is a small inconvenience, but Align prioritizes “starting to observe from this cycle” over “inheriting past achievements.” Rather than thinking of it as a migration, it may sit more comfortably as a separate entry point.
Is there any philosophical background?
There is. The three-point structure of aligning Mind, Word, and Body has a classical introspective tradition underneath it, where three kinds of acts are seen as something to bring into alignment. That said, none of that origin is brought into the UI or the wording. Inside the app, these are simply treated as Mind, Word, and Body — three modern elements. The distance we chose is: you don’t need to know the background, and if you do, a little extra depth becomes visible.
Is sync supported?
At the MVP stage, storage is local-only, and there is no cross-device sync. Sync is planned for the next version (v1.1), going through a cloud the user owns themselves — iCloud or Google Drive. The intent is not to gather data on a developer-side server, but to let data move only within the user’s own account.
The longer thread on “why align the three points at all” is split across What Align is looking at and Mind, Word, Body — what the three points are.