For Apple Watch
A handful of beads, held inside your watch.
Tilt your wrist and they fall. Hold still and they settle. Flick it and they climb the wall, break against it, and rain back down.
None of it is animation. Nine hundred beads are solved sixty times a second, pulled by the gravity your wrist is actually moving through.
Pour them with your pointer. Tap to shake.
- 900
- beads
- 60
- frames a second
- 0
- network calls
- 2 MB
- to download
Every bead is solved, every frame.
The solver is a position-based fluid — Clavet double density relaxation — written in Swift and run on the watch itself. Nothing is precomputed, nothing is a texture, and no two pours are the same.
watchOS has no Metal, so there is no GPU to hand the drawing to. Every frame is rasterised on the CPU of a computer the size of a postage stamp, and it still holds sixty frames a second.
The beads at the top of this page are a smaller cousin running in your browser: the same 422×514 coordinate space as the watch screen, the same colour ramp stop for stop, and the same trick of sorting beads into sixty-four colour buckets so the number of draw calls stays fixed however many beads there are.
A bead’s colour is its speed. Deep blue when it is lying still, brighter as it moves, and white only when it has genuinely been thrown — so a hard shake reads as spray, and a slow tilt does not.
It answers your wrist
Gravity comes from the watch’s own motion sensor, so the beads respond to the movement you are actually making rather than following a script.
One tap from the face
A complication puts it on the watch face, so it opens in a tap instead of being hunted for in the app grid.
Entirely standalone
No iPhone app to install, nothing on your phone, no account to make. It lives on the watch and only on the watch.
There is no network code in this app.
Not disabled, not opt-out — absent. There is no analytics, no account, no advertising and no tracking, because there is nothing in the app capable of sending anything anywhere. Motion readings move the beads and then vanish; the only thing kept on the watch is a volume level.
That is a checkable fact rather than a promise, which is the whole reason for saying it this way.
Read the privacy policyThe details
- Requires
- watchOS 11 or later
- Watches
- Series 6 and newer, SE (2nd gen), every Ultra
- iPhone app
- None. Beadfall is watch-only
- Purchases
- One. No subscriptions, no in-app purchases, no ads
- Data collected
- None
Help
There is nothing to set up and nothing to learn — open it and move your wrist. These are the questions that actually arrive.
The screen dims while I am using it
It does, and this is the honest answer: watchOS decides when to dim and an app cannot override it. The frustrating part is that tilting your wrist to pour the beads is the same gesture the watch reads as you looking away, so the toy can dim precisely because it is being played with.
A tap on the screen brings it back to full brightness and restarts the timer. In the Watch app on your iPhone, under Display & Brightness, setting Wake Duration to 70 seconds buys the longest the system allows.
The beads keep moving while the screen is dim, so nothing is lost. It is only harder to see. Making this better is the thing being worked on most.
Opening it from the watch face
Beadfall comes with a complication, so it opens from the face rather than being hunted for in the app grid.
Press and hold the watch face and tap Edit, swipe left to the complications screen, tap the slot you want, then turn the Digital Crown to find Beadfall. Press the crown to save and tap the face to return.
Not every face has complication slots, and the ones that do differ in shape. Beadfall fits the round slots and the corner slots.
It has no sound
Not yet. Sound exists but is switched off while its character is reworked, because what was there did not match how the beads move.
Battery
Simulating nine hundred beads sixty times a second is real work, so expect it to use more battery than a typical watch app while it is open. It stops the moment you leave it, and it never runs in the background.
Getting in touch
Bugs, requests, or anything that behaves strangely — email hello@sevensummits.studio. Saying which watch you have and what watchOS version it runs usually saves a round trip.