Sprout

One second a day.
In a year, a film.

Sprout is an iPhone app for recording one to three seconds of your day — or taking a single photo — and letting the days join themselves into a film you can watch whenever you like.

There is nothing to edit and nothing to upload. You open it, hold the shutter, and close it again. The film already exists; it just gets one day longer.

What it's for

Things that change too slowly to notice, and are startling to watch back. A baby learning to sit, then stand, then run. A plant on the windowsill through four seasons. Yourself, after the run, every evening.

One day on its own is worth almost nothing. Four hundred of them in a row will stop you where you stand.

How a day works

  1. Tap or hold. A tap takes one photo. Holding records up to three seconds. Shoot another if you want — the previous take waits underneath and you can swap back with one tap.
  2. Miss a day, fill it in. Every empty date has a + on it, however far back. Pull something in from your photo library; for a video you drag along a filmstrip to choose which seconds to keep.
  3. Watch it, or export it. Press play any time. Export the reel as a video to your Photos library, or hand it to whoever it's for.

It never leaves your phone

No account. No sign-in. No cloud. No analytics. No ads. No third-party code of any kind. Sprout makes no network requests at all — not for backup, not for crash reports, not for anything.

That cuts both ways, and it is worth knowing before you start: delete the app and it is all gone, and nobody has a copy to hand back to you. Export the films that matter.

Face smoothing, if you use it, runs on this phone's GPU. Face position is found with Apple's on-device Vision framework, frame by frame, in memory. Nothing about your face is stored or sent anywhere. Full details are in the privacy policy.

Good to know

Questions

The support page answers the common ones — moving to a new phone, exporting, filling in past days. Anything it doesn't cover, write to weijiacheng34@163.com.