Nudgery

What Is Nudgery

Nudgery is an Android app that asks you your own questions, on a schedule you choose. You will be able to view the history of each nudge you record, and identify trends over time.

Nudgery contains no ads, and your data stays on your phone (unless you take the time to move it somewhere else on purpose).

Read the privacy policy →

What Can You Use Nudgery For?

Nudgery was initially written to help the author log daily migraine status over time, because it is unusually challenging to have good habits when your brain is low-key malfunctioning. The author also thought (while we're here) it would be fun to be able to keep an eye on whatever the user (you!) thinks would be helpful or interesting to keep tabs on for a while.

You can set up a Nudge to have your phone ask you anything, on any schedule. Here are some possibilities to get you started:

• Did you have a headache today?
• What did you dream about last night?
• When was the last time you ate a vegetable?
• How annoying was your boss today?
• Did you do anything fun today on purpose?

Additionally, you can set up follow-up questions for specific answers. For instance, if your boss scored 7 or greater on being annoying that day, you could then ask yourself for some brief follow-up notes.

Ethos

As a decades-long software engineer, I adore free software that does its (one) job, and immediately gets out of the way.

That said, I can absolutely understand why this might come across as some kind of trick: Phone apps usually sneak in for free, and then do their best to take as much of your money as possible, foster a kind of low-key addiction, and then go after your friends and family.

Nudgery is not your typical phone app. It takes the approach I take writing something just for myself: The software does only what it needs to do in service of the main job, and then stops. If you're used to phone apps begging for "engagement" all the time, it might even seem broken at first. It's not broken; it's just not trying to mug you constantly (like everything else).

No tracking, no ads, no revenue stream of any kind sneaking in to hijack all the design priorities one by one and ruin the party, and your data stays yours. The way it should be.

Please enjoy.

About your data

Eagle-eyed readers of the user guide will have spotted that I call out multiple times that this is not a health app, and yet: Keeping tabs on your specific human experience is precisely what this app was made to do. It would be very silly / inexcusably negligent of me to assume that there wouldn't be anything related to the user's health or state of mind in there almost immediately.

While Nudgery isn't technically a "health app", I'm approaching data security as if it were: Your data never moves off your phone, unless you do it manually. To clarify further: The reason Nudgery is not technically classified as a health app, is that health apps are assumed to provide health guidance or built-in health information of some kind. Nudgery does not ship with health data or have any opinions to offer, and will never try to suggest "healthier" behaviors on its own. It is essentially a blank log book.

Nudgery is, however, built to help you keep track of things like how often you wake up with a headache, or how your overall mood changes over the course of a year. If a doctor asks you how many times something happens in a month, Nudgery can help you collect a good answer. You could even set up a nudge that reminds you to do something intended to improve your health, but those are your intentions; not ours. At any rate, data like that absolutely deserves to be kept private.

How this got built

While I have been writing software for decades, this is my first Android app.

Nudgery was the test case for a process I wanted to try with a coding agent (in this case, Claude Code). I hadn't worked with coding agents for very long, and the fact that I didn't have a realistic sense of what they could or couldn't accomplish seemed like a huge problem to me, a software professional. So, with a healthy dose of what I'd call "open-minded skepticism" and a whole lot of professional software development experience, I got to work kicking some tires.

Before the project, I was just starting to get a sense of what agentic coding could do well, and what it didn't seem to ever get right on its own. What I did know all too well were common failure modes of regular human teams, and it seemed to me that many of the strengths for those two sides are very neatly complementary. I had a hunch about a nice way to work: End-User Document Driven Development. If the human user started by writing the end-user docs, and the agent treated those docs as canon, there would always be accurate end-user docs (for a change). Further, agents are very good at adhering to coding practices, so I threw in a few of those that most human coders aren't nearly disciplined enough to even try to do most of the time, but that would help human maintainers immensely going forward.

It worked.