Randhawa & Bhullar

Two deliberately minimal iOS apps that share one idea: your life leaves a shape, in space and in time, and both are worth keeping.

• Randhawa (this directory) maps your places: one dot each time you open it. App Store
• Bhullar (Bhullar/) telescopes your time: one grid of dots, from the months of the year to the minutes of today. App Store
• MemoryKit (MemoryKit/) is the shared layer: memories (a thought, a photo, a place, a time) made in either app and shown in both, synced only through the user's own private iCloud.

This is the complete source for both shipping apps, MIT licensed. The apps' whole promise is privacy by architecture: no accounts, no analytics, no servers of ours, and data we cannot read. Open code is the strongest form of that promise. Don't take our word for it; read it. The plan lives in ROADMAP.md.

Randhawa (v3.3, space)

A deliberately minimal iOS app: carry your phone and it draws the map of your life. A dot where you go, a line where you moved, darker where you return. Over weeks and years the ink becomes a map only you can read: dense where your life happens, sparse where you've wandered.

Since 3.2 the map draws itself by default: the intro asks for location once, and if you say yes the trail listens for the two low-power signals iOS offers a sleeping app, significant location changes and visits, and marks a dot each time you have actually gone somewhere. It never runs continuously and never keeps the phone awake. One tap forgets everything it gathered, one screen turns it off, and opening the app still places a dot the old way. The argument for reversing a promise this file used to make, twice, is in ROADMAP.md, under "The one we reversed".

3.2 also redrew the map as ink: blots where you stayed, threads where you moved, today in orange on top, all translucent so repetition darkens. Tap a blot to open the place, or a gold dot to open a memory. The sparkles button toggles between the map and the constellation; press and slide it to set the veil anywhere in between. "Export your map" hands you a single file with everything in it.

Since 3.0 the dots can carry more than presence. Tap the plus button and pin a memory to where you are: a thought, a photo, or both. Memories show as gold dots on the map, and they flow into Bhullar (the sibling time app in Bhullar/), where they resurface on the day they were made. Randhawa gives a memory its place; Bhullar gives it its time.

Two ends of one veil:

• Map: your ink over a real, muted Apple Maps basemap.
• Constellation: the basemap gone, just the shape of your places on black.

One widget: Map, an Apple Maps snapshot drawn with the same ink, updated whenever a dot lands. (The old Constellation widget was retired in 3.0; the constellation lives on inside the app.)

Privacy, and the one honest change in 3.0

Through 2.x the promise was "nothing ever leaves your phone." That promise had a cost: lose the phone, lose the map. 3.0 keeps the spirit and fixes the cost:

• By default, everything still lives only on the device.
• iCloud sync is optional and off until the user turns it on. When on, moments and memories are mirrored into the user's private CloudKit database in the container iCloud.Prabhchintan.Randhawa. That database belongs to the user's Apple Account: we cannot read it, we run no servers, and storage counts against the user's own iCloud space (these records are tiny). Sign into iCloud on a new phone and the map comes back.
• There is still no account system, no password, and no analytics. The user's Apple Account is the account; CloudKit ties records to it automatically.
• The App Store privacy label stays "Data Not Collected": Apple's definition of collection is transmitting data off-device in a way the developer can access, and a private CloudKit database is not accessible to the developer. Re-verify that reading of the App Privacy Details page at submission time.

Location, as of 3.2, is asked for once, at the intro, and the map draws itself if the answer is yes. The trail takes a fix when iOS wakes the app for a significant location change or a visit, no more often than the chosen cadence, and opening the app places a dot as it always has. Answer While Using only and the app falls back to a dot per open. There is no location background mode and no continuous updates, so the app never holds the system awake and never lights the status bar. Where the dots go does not change at all: the same file, the same optional private CloudKit database, no servers of ours. Reverse geocoding (naming a place, in either app) and map tiles go through Apple's frameworks under Apple's privacy policy. The camera, when you take a photo for a memory, writes to the memory and not to your photo library.

What's inside

Randhawa.xcodeproj         Two targets: the app and its widget extension
MemoryKit/                 Shared by BOTH apps (this project and Bhullar):
  MomentStore.swift        Moment model, App Group persistence, geometry
                           (clustering + constellation projection), MomentSync
                           file ops used when iCloud records arrive
  MemoryModel.swift        Memory model + App Group persistence + photo files
  MemoryStore.swift        Observable store the app UIs bind to (app targets)
  CloudSync.swift          CKSyncEngine wrapper: private database, zone
                           "SpaceTime", record types Moment and Memory
  MemoryViews.swift        Composer sheet, memory list, detail view (shared UI)
Shared/
  ConstellationView.swift  One Canvas that draws the constellation
Randhawa/
  RandhawaApp.swift        App entry point
  ContentView.swift        Map/constellation screens, memory capture, sync
                           offer, erase, captions
  SpaceModel.swift         CoreLocation one-shot sampling + moment list, and
                           LocationTrail, the opt-in background sampler
  Randhawa.entitlements    App Group + iCloud (CloudKit)
  Assets.xcassets          App icon (1024 square, no alpha) + accent color
RandhawaWidget/
  RandhawaWidget.swift     The Map widget (systemSmall/Medium/Large)
  RandhawaWidgetBundle.swift
  RandhawaWidget.entitlements   App Group only; the widget never syncs
  Info.plist               WidgetKit extension point
Archive/randhawa-time-v1/  The v1.0 year-grid sources (now living on in Bhullar)

Both apps and the widget share the moment and memory files through the App Group group.Prabhchintan.Randhawa. The app reloads widget timelines whenever data changes. Sampling rules: one location fix per foreground activation, with activations within 60 seconds ignored. That is the whole story until the user turns the trail on, at which point Always authorization is requested and significant-change and visit callbacks add dots too, never closer together than the chosen cadence.

Sync design in one paragraph: the JSON files in the App Group stay the source of truth, and CloudSync (one instance per app process, only when the user has sync on) mirrors them record by record with CKSyncEngine. Each app fetches on foreground and lets the engine push queued changes on its own schedule. Erase-all deletes the whole CloudKit zone, so wiping the map wipes it everywhere. Conflicts are resolved by taking the server record as the new base and reapplying local fields, which for this append-mostly data converges immediately.

Build & run

1. Open Randhawa.xcodeproj in Xcode 16 or later.
2. First build after 3.0 (already done, kept for a fresh machine): automatic signing must provision two capabilities for the app target, the App Group (group.Prabhchintan.Randhawa) and iCloud (CloudKit) with container iCloud.Prabhchintan.Randhawa. If signing complains, open each target's Signing & Capabilities tab once and let it refresh. The widget target needs only the App Group.
3. Select the Randhawa scheme and a device, then Run (Cmd-R). Grant location when asked; your first dot appears immediately.

Deployment target is iOS 17.0 (CKSyncEngine needs 17). Version is 3.1 (build 12) on both targets; this ships as an update to the existing App Store record (Apple App ID 6742061604).

CloudKit: one manual step before release

CloudKit schemas are created lazily in the Development environment the first time the app saves records. Before shipping a release that writes a new field, open the CloudKit Console for iCloud.Prabhchintan.Randhawa, confirm the record types Moment and Memory exist with the fields the code writes, and deploy the schema to Production. A store build pointed at an empty Production schema cannot sync.

3.1 does not need this step. The one new field, a moment's source, is local to the device file by design and is never written to CloudKit. The schema is unchanged from 3.0.

App Store notes

• Privacy label: Data Not Collected (see the privacy section above). The trail does not change this: it writes to the same on-device file and the same private CloudKit database, and neither is readable by us.
• Two location purpose strings are set in build settings, INFOPLIST_KEY_NSLocationWhenInUseUsageDescription for the per-open dot and INFOPLIST_KEY_NSLocationAlwaysAndWhenInUseUsageDescription for the trail. There is deliberately no UIBackgroundModes entry: significant-change and visit monitoring relaunch a terminated app without it, and adding it would invite a rejection for capability the app does not use.
• Photos are attached through the system Photos picker, which runs out of process and needs no permission string and no privacy declaration.
• Full listing copy lives in AppStore/metadata.md; release notes in AppStore/whatsnew-3.1.md.

App icon

The icon is the brand mark (apple-touch-icon.png at the repo root, upscaled to 1024 by 1024, opaque). An alternative constellation icon lives at Archive/constellation-icon.png and can be regenerated with swift scripts/makeicon.swift, which writes straight into the asset catalog. Only run it if you want to switch back.