The App Store notification just says "Ready for Distribution," which is a strangely industrial phrase for something you spent six months building for people whose brains don't work the way the tools were built for.
But it's ready. And it's out there.
Six months, one broken thing
I started building CanopyOS after a January diagnosis and a spring where every productivity system I'd carried for thirty years suddenly stopped making sense. I've written most of that story already in The Architecture of My Brain. The short version: I was told, gently and clinically, that what I'd been asking my brain to do every day for three decades — solo willpower against a brain wired for variable capacity — was never going to work at scale.
So I built the tool I needed. Not the tool I thought I should want.
The bet was simple. If ADHD brains have variable capacity, the day should be designed around energy, not time. If decisions are the tax we can't afford, the setup should absorb them. If the interruption is coming from inside our own head, the tool should catch it, not block it.
Every one of those bets became a feature. Every feature got tested by the small group of people who agreed to install a version of an app that wasn't finished yet and tell me what broke.
What shipped in 1.0
Not a feature tour. Just a walk through a day.
Morning: the app opens with a question, not a task. "How do you feel right now?" That answer feeds the day's prediction before any to-do gets named. The check-in is the regulation step — because the body has to be in the room before the brain can plan.
Midday: CanopyOS reads Apple Health data — sleep quality, HRV — and suggests when your brain is most likely to focus. One tap blocks it on your calendar. A widget and Live Activity show the block on the home screen and lock screen, so you don't have to open the app to know when your window is.
In-focus: Understory. Voice capture that catches a thought in fifteen seconds and returns you to the intention. On-device transcription — voice never leaves your phone.
Evening: reflection — how the day's predicted energy compared to what you actually felt. The gap is the data. Over weeks, it teaches you something no productivity book can.
What it isn't yet
The 1.0 doesn't have Android. Or iPad. Or Apple Watch — though hands-free Understory capture from the wrist is the feature I most want to build next. No team features. No on-device AI suggesting how to triage your captures at the end of the day.
The 1.0 does have a real, working app that gets a real ADHD day done.
I'll ship the rest at the same pace this got built — slowly enough to hold together, quickly enough that the people who tested it don't feel abandoned.
The invitation
If your brain works like mine — if "try harder" stopped being useful a long time ago, if you've built and thrown away a graveyard of productivity systems, if every Sunday night arrives with a plan that's already too much for a Monday morning brain — this is the app I built for you.
Thank you
To Ally, my therapist, for the January conversation that started it. To Clare for keeping the marketing plan honest. To everyone who signed up to wait for something they'd never seen. To Christian, Henry, Melissa, and Shoina, who let me change the app underneath them without warning and told me what broke. To my sons for saying "yeah, dad, that makes sense" when I told them what I was building.
The canopy is open. Everything underneath it is what we grow now.