Pulse
Long distance
A long-distance relationship app that doesn't ask you to text all day.
Distance takes away everything you used to know without asking: how they slept, what kind of day it was, whether tonight is a good night to talk. Pulse is a couples app that gives some of that back in one sentence a day, and almost nothing in it needs the two of you awake at the same time.
Free · iPhone and Apple Watch · Any distance, any time zone · No location, ever
The real problem
It was never that you message too little.
Long-distance couples who are struggling are rarely sending too few messages. They are usually sending a great many, at the wrong hours, about the wrong things, and feeling further apart every week. The volume is not the axis.
- The background hum disappears
- In one home you know your partner slept badly without either of you saying so. You hear the tone of the door. You notice they have not eaten. At a distance, every piece of that has to be turned into a sentence, typed, sent and interpreted.
- The tax lands on the worst days
- Explaining costs energy. The days you most need to be understood are exactly the days you have the least left to spend on explaining, so the hardest days are the quietest ones, and the quiet gets read as distance.
- The clock turns into an argument
- A message sent at the wrong hour lands as an obligation. A call scheduled into the only overlapping window becomes a performance neither of you can skip without it meaning something.
So the goal is not more contact. It is getting some of that ambient knowledge back without asking either of you to narrate your life.
From the journal: Staying close long distance, without texting all day
Seven in the morning where you are. One in the morning where they are. The same Tuesday, twice.
One day, two clocks
Say one of you is in Vienna and one is in Toronto.
Six hours apart: the ordinary European and North American distance, not a dramatic one. Here is a full weekday of it, as the app actually plays it. Exactly one moment in the whole day needs you both awake, and it lasts half a minute.
- Vienna
- Toronto
- Asleep At work Free
The same twenty-four hours, on two dials, in Vienna time. Take out sleep, take out an ordinary working day, and on a Tuesday these two lives do not overlap at all. That is the problem, and it is not solved by trying harder.
-
07:10 01:10
You wake. They have four hours of sleep left.
Your morning summary is on your wrist: your own night, yours alone, never sent anywhere. Their clock sits in your chat header, so you know without doing arithmetic that this is not the moment to call.
-
08:20 02:20
You send a silent "I'm here".
No banner, no buzz on a sleeping phone. It is simply there the next time they look, and it fades on its own after six hours whether or not either of you ever mentions it.
-
13:00 07:00
Their morning. One sentence is waiting.
Built from your night, compared only against your own recent weeks, with one concrete thing they could do about it tonight. Never a number, never a chart, never how far anything moved.
-
19:20 13:20
Your evening, their working afternoon. You are running low.
You mark your social battery. The coarse level crosses over; the reason stays with you. If they are running low too, Pulse says so to both of you and suggests this is not the night to start the hard conversation.
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21:30 15:30
The one moment that needs you both.
You press and hold the heart in chat. If they are holding it at the same moment, both screens say Connected. It takes thirty seconds inside their working afternoon, and it is the only thing on this page that will not work asynchronously.
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22:40 16:40
You answer the evening question six hours before they do.
Neither answer unlocks until both are in, so nobody reads the other's first. They answer theirs while you are asleep, and a small echo of it is waiting when you wake, which is the closest thing to a shared evening two clocks will allow.
Local time sharing
Their clock, on your screen. Not their location.
Turn it on and your time zone travels to your partner inside the same end-to-end encrypted record as your name and photo. Their app then shows what time it is where you are, on their Home screen, in the chat header, on their widget and on their Apple Watch.
A time zone, not a place
What crosses is the string "Europe/Vienna". It says which clock you keep, never where you are standing. Pulse has no map, no live location, no background location and nothing that draws a dot on anything.
Off until you turn it on
It stays off by default, it follows you if you travel, and turning it off clears it from their screen rather than freezing the last value there.
It answers the question you keep asking
"Is it too late to write?" is the most-asked question in a long-distance relationship, and it has an answer that does not require either of you to say anything.
Hold, together
Press and hold. If they are holding too, you both feel it.
The heart in chat is not a reaction. Press it and hold; if your partner is pressing at the same moment, both screens change and both of you feel it at once. No distance is involved in the sentence "we are doing this right now", and for two people who have not been in the same room for months, that is the part that is actually missing.
Hold the broken heart instead and the glass cracks on both screens at the same time. It was built for the same reason.
Nothing that wakes anyone
Things you can send into the middle of their night.
Wordless signals carry a fixed meaning rather than text. They never spell themselves out on a Lock Screen, and each one expires on its own so nothing accumulates into a backlog you owe a reply to.
- A silent "I'm here" Fades after six hours
- The smallest possible thing. No question inside it, so there is nothing to answer.
- A longing Fades after one hour
- Deliberately the shortest-lived of them, because it is about this hour and not about the week.
- A held heart Fades after twelve hours
- Left behind after a hold, or sent on its own, and still there when they wake up on the other side of the night.
- A "miss you" Fades after a day
- And if you keep opening the chat without writing anything, Pulse may tell them you might just be missing them. Never a count: "a few times", and the number itself never leaves your phone.
- Your social battery Fades after six hours
- A coarse level you set yourself, never sensed from your body. They learn how much you have left, never why.
- Snap for them One press
- The Camera Control or Action button opens Pulse straight to the camera, so what you are looking at reaches them before the moment is gone.
Timing
The conversation you should not start at one in the morning.
Most long-distance arguments are not about the subject. They happen in the only window both people were awake, when at least one of them was already finished for the day.
- A heads-up before it starts
- If you are both running low, Pulse says so to both of you and points at a better window instead. It is the one piece of advice in the app, and it exists because the alternative is a fight about nothing at 1am.
- Ask for what you need
- A quiet card in chat for affection, a hug, a talk or closeness, easy to send and easy to answer. The notification never names what was asked, on either side.
- A way back
- After a stretch that has felt distant, a structured, low-pressure nudge to reach out, so getting back does not depend on one of you finding the perfect opening line.
- How to care for me
- A short, fixed-choice answer each of you writes about yourself: what genuinely helps on a hard day, what is better skipped. Your partner is reading rather than guessing from six hours away.
The life in between
A shared life does not need a shared address.
Everything two people build together, kept in one place that belongs to nobody else. A long-distance relationship needs the ordinary shared life more than a close one does, not less, because none of it happens by accident any more.
Together since
The day you count from, kept as a live day-and-hour counter, with a nudge before the anniversary and one quiet celebration on the day.
Our Story
A shared timeline of photos and small moments, which resurfaces one of them on the day it happened. "One year ago today" is a different sentence when you are apart.
A shared calendar
Confirmed plans, anniversaries from Our Story and events either of you adds, mirrored into your own everyday calendar. The next flight goes here.
A watch night
A shared watchlist of films, series, books and music. Either of you adds one, both can like it, comment on it or react, and a "we should watch this" can be put straight onto the calendar as an evening.
A shared shopping list
What one of you needs arrives as a card the other can approve, buy and tick off, which is how a care package usually starts.
Chat, in both your languages
End-to-end encrypted text, photos and GIFs, and a long-press on any message translates it. Pulse itself speaks English, German, Persian, Arabic and Russian.
What it will not do
No map. No countdown. No proof you were paying attention.
There is no location sharing in Pulse, not even opt-in, and no continuous tracking of anything. Your partner never sees your heart rate, your sleep, your step count or any other measurement; one derived sentence leaves your phone and the numbers behind it do not. There are no read receipts to hold against each other, no reply timers, and no badge that punishes a day you had nothing left to give.
What it also will not do: replace a call, close a distance, or tell you whether your relationship is going to work. It is a way of carrying a little more of each other through an ordinary week, and it is free.
Long-distance questions
What people ask before they install it.
- Is Pulse a good app for a long-distance relationship?
- It is one of the few couples apps designed around the assumption that the two of you are rarely awake together, so yes, if what you want is to stay attuned to each other's days rather than to schedule more calls. It is the wrong choice if you are looking for a shared map, a countdown to the next visit, a game you play together, or anything that measures how much attention each of you is paying. Pulse has none of those and is not going to add them.
- Does Pulse work across time zones?
- That is most of what it is for. You can share your time zone with your partner so their app shows your local time on their Home screen, in the chat header, on the widget and on their Apple Watch. The daily cue, the daily question, the evening reflection and every wordless signal are all designed to be answered whenever you next pick up your phone, not at the moment they were sent.
- What if our waking hours barely overlap at all?
- Then almost everything still works. The only feature in Pulse that genuinely needs both of you awake is "Hold, together", where you each press and hold the heart at the same moment. Everything else waits: a cue sits until morning, a question stays locked until you have both answered, a wordless signal is simply there the next time they look.
- Can my partner see where I am?
- No, and there is no setting that would let them. Pulse has no map, no live location and no background location. Sharing your local time shares a time zone such as "Europe/Vienna", which says which clock you keep and nothing about where you are standing. It is off until you turn it on, and turning it off clears it from their screen.
- Do we both need an Apple Watch?
- Neither of you has to have one. The Watch is what gives Pulse the signals behind the daily cue, so a partner with one will send richer cues, and a partner without one still gets everything else: chat, Our Story, the shared calendar, the questions, the signals. An iPhone on iOS 17 or later is the only real requirement. WHOOP support is written and disclosed, but not switched on yet.
- We do not have the same first language. Does that matter?
- Pulse itself runs in English, German, Persian, Arabic and Russian, including right-to-left, and each of you can use it in your own. Inside chat, a long press on any message translates it. The wordless signals carry a fixed meaning rather than words, so they arrive already in your partner's language.
- What does it cost?
- Nothing today. Every feature, both partners, no ads, no trackers and no sale of data. If a paid plan ever arrives it will go through the App Store, we will say so clearly in advance, and you will be able to cancel.