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.

Unfortunately, the landscape of free phone apps tends toward being an absolute wasteland in terms of software that I don't immediately regret downloading. It makes sense: In fact, it's probably the only realistic outcome when the vast majority of free apps are simultaneously trying to sell you something while they are busy grabbing as much of your data as they can, to sell it to someone else. In addition to being maybe the most complicated way to write a piece of software that actually does what it says on the tin, it is... exceedingly annoying, and makes the "getting out of the way" part virtually impossible to support.

Nudgery, on the other hand, takes the approach I would take when writing something for myself. This also makes sense, because that's exactly what happened.

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.

Please enjoy.

About your data

Eagle-eyed readers will have spotted that I call out multiple times that this is not a health app, and yet: I open with a tale relating that phone-based scheduled logging of my own migraine status was the original inspiration for the entire thing.

To clarify: It's not a health app, because everything that might qualify as "health" content would have to come from you. Nudgery isn't trying to suggest healthier behaviors, or get you to do anything but answer whatever questions you write.

That said, Nudgery helps you log whatever you want to about your human experience, so lots of users are going to almost immediately start putting data related to physical or mental health in there. With that in mind: Of course we're going to treat all your data as if it's health data that should be kept secure and local.

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.