The bird that comes back

There's a grey heron that returns to the same spot on the water every morning.

Not because it has to. Not because an app is tracking its streak. It comes back because that's what herons do. Quietly, without fuss, without anyone watching.

That image is where this app started.

Most habit trackers are built around anxiety. Miss a day and your streak breaks. Miss two and the app sends a notification. Miss a week and the whole thing starts to feel like evidence of something. That you're the kind of person who can't follow through.

I've abandoned more habit trackers than I care to count. Not because I stopped doing the habits. Because I stopped wanting to be managed by the app.

Heron is built around a different idea: that consistency doesn't need to be performed. That a habit is just something you return to, the way the heron returns to the water. Some days you're there early. Some days you almost don't make it. The point is the returning.

The contribution grid, the GitHub-style year of small squares, is the only metric Heron shows you. Not a streak counter. Not a percentage. Not a score.

Just the shape of your year, slowly filling in.

It's a calmer thing to look at than a number. Numbers go up and down and carry a verdict. A grid just shows you where you've been.

There are no badges in Heron. No levels. No weekly summaries telling you how you're doing relative to last week.

There's just the habit, and whether you did it today, and a quiet record of the days you showed up.

That's enough.

Heron is a habit tracker for people who want to build habits without being gamified into them. It's at useheron.app .