Featured Articles
Article in App of the Week category.
Endel is the Soundtrack Your Relaxation and Focus Needs
Have you ever struggled to go to sleep? Needed a way to clear your head and stay calm? Or just wanted a way to help…
Have you ever struggled to go to sleep? Needed a way to clear your head and stay calm? Or just wanted a way to help focus to increase your productivity. There’s different tactics out there from classic music to Pomodoro timers. Endel isn’t much different from the former, but with a more personalized take.
Endel creates personalized soundtracks of relaxing noise to help keep you immersed in your task — be it trying to sleep, trying to focus, or trying to relax.
To pull this off, Endel ties into things like the weather and the Health app. It syncs with Health to tailor its sounds to your body and environment. Different times of day and your current energy level will produce different sounds to help you.
This is useful also during workouts. The app is able to monitor your motion data to match the tempo of the soundtrack to that of your cadence. So while you run or go for a walk it will feel balanced and in tune with one another. Such an incredibly smart app.
Functionality aside, the app is pleasantly designed. It is a bit abstract with a soft white color scheme sitting atop a dark background. As you listen, waveforms synthesize across your screen in mesmerizing lines that encapsulate your attention just as much as the audio.
Recently, Endel got a big new update with some important features — starting with the smart alarm. Endel was designed to help you relax, focus, and doze off but in this case, its soothing soundscapes can now be used to lull you back to consciousness. It will wake up gradually, slowly pulling you from sleep to wake up more refreshed than a sudden and jarring alarm clock. The app developers have also put more effort into supporting the iOS accessibility features, in this case VoiceOver. This new support makes it easier for visually impaired users to rely on the app by hovering over elements to get an audio description. I love seeing developers focus on these incredibly important accessibility features.
Endel is of course made for your iPhone, but it can run on other Apple devices as well. You can power it up on your iPad if you prefer to use that as a speaker, or even your Apple Watch. The Apple Watch is entirely native so it can run without your iPhone nearby and even has its own delightful graphics tailored to the tiny screen.
Much praise has been heaped on Endel, including Apple’s own App Store editors. The app proudly debuts its Editors Choice badge and sits at a well-earned 4.6 stars from its more than 7.6K reviews. Between its availability, uniqueness, smarts, and usefulness, this is one of my new go-to apps when I need to focus up or catch some zzz’s.
But enough about other people's apps.
