SunshinePal
Track your sunlight. Discover you're a vampire.
I started my career by optimizing for addiction. We didn't call it that, of course. We called it "Retention," "Daily Active Users (DAU)," and "Time Spent." We celebrated when users spent 40 minutes a day in our app. We high-fived when they opened it 15 times a session.
But late at night, staring at my own screen time report, I felt a gnawing emptiness. I was building digital cages and polishing the bars.
I realized I was a "successful" Product Manager, but I was failing at being a human.
The Metric That Betrayed Me
The industry standard is clear: High Duration = Good Product.
If you're building TikTok or Netflix, fine. Your business model is selling eyeballs to advertisers. But for health and wellness apps? This metric is a lie.
I remember working on a meditation app where we discussed "gamifying" the experience to keep users in the app longer. Think about that irony. We were using anxiety-inducing notification loops to help people... reduce anxiety.
It reminded me of that scene in The Matrix where the humans are just batteries. We were turning our users into data points, harvesting their attention until they were drained.
As a recovering people-pleaser (and someone with significant "To-Do List Anxiety"), I knew this wasn't healed behavior. It was just another form of noise.
Defining "Passive Value"
I started wondering: What if the best interaction is no interaction?
I call this Passive Value. It's the opposite of the "Engagement Trap." It’s technology that works for you in the background, like a silent guardian, rather than a needy toddler demanding your attention.
Your fridge gives you value 24/7, but you don't stare at it for 3 hours a day. Your thermostat keeps you alive, but it doesn't send you a push notification saying "Look at me! I'm heating!"
I wanted to build software like that. Software that respects your time so much, it encourages you to leave.
SunshinePal: A Tool for Leaving
This philosophy gave birth to SunshinePal. My new "North Star Metric" isn't Time Spent In App. It's Time Spent In Daylight.
If you are spending 30 minutes inside SunshinePal, I have failed. You should be outside. You should be looking at clouds, not pixels.
That's why I designed it to be almost invisible:
It uses the sensors you already wear: The Apple Watch (Series 6+) measures ambient light automatically. You don't have to "start" a session.
The Widget is the App: You glance at your home screen. "Oh, 15 minutes today. Need more." That's it. Interaction over using Glance Value.
Notifications are Nudges, not Hooks: "The sun is setting soon." It's a prompt to go experience the real world, not a prompt to open the digital one.
It’s "Quiet Tech" for a loud world.
Conclusion: Omnipresent, Yet Invisible
There's a line I love: "The best technology should be like sunshine: omnipresent, but never intrusive."
I'm tired of fighting for attention. I'm tired of aggressive algorithms. I just want to help you (and myself) feel a little more human.
So, please, download SunshinePal. Set it up. And then, for the love of everything holy, close the app and go outside.
I live in a city where sunshine feels like a holiday.
When the sun comes out, something magical happens — people just appear. On benches, in plazas, on any patch of concrete that catches the light. Like plants turning toward a window.
I loved watching it. But I kept missing it myself.
Working from home, deep in some task, I'd look up and realize the sun was already gone. Again.
Another golden afternoon I spent indoors without noticing.
One day I checked my Apple Watch health data. It tracks "Time in Daylight" — something I'd never looked at.
My numbers:
What I estimated: 30 min/day
What I actually got: 12 min/day
Weekdays: almost zero
I was living like a vampire and had no idea.
So I decided to build something about it.
No coding experience. Just AI tools and stubbornness.
2 weeks later, I had an app. 🎉
4 App Store rejections later, I had an app that actually worked.
It's called SunshinePal:
→ Tracks your real sunlight exposure
→ Gives you a daily score based on time, frequency, and morning sun
→ Shows your weekly patterns (turns out I'm a weekend-only human)
→ Reminds you when the sun is out
Now it's live. Free to use.
For the remote workers. The cloudy city dwellers. The accidental vampires.
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