iOS & Android · widget-first
Adelante
Spanish for go forward.
A motivation app built for the one screen you already look at forty times a day. No feed to scroll, no streak to protect, no account to make. Just the right words, already there when you glance down.
9:41
Tap for another
A real quote from the library, on a Lock Screen widget
The idea
Most motivation apps want your attention. This one gives it back.
Adelante has five screens: Today, Widgets, Discover, Saved and Settings. You will use them for about four minutes, once, and then mostly never again. That is the design working, not failing.
The product isn't the app. The product is the widget.
You tell it what kind of words move you (stoic, study, gym, calm, gratitude, discipline, faith, thirteen more) and it keeps a quietly beautiful widget on your Home Screen, Lock Screen or StandBy, gently updated with exactly that. Nothing pings you. Nothing counts your days. The words are simply there, in the gap between unlocking your phone and remembering why you picked it up.
Everything ships inside the app: 12,828 pieces of writing, all of it either original Adelante prose or genuine public-domain text with a real citation. It works with aeroplane mode on. Nothing about you ever leaves the device, not your categories, not your favourites, and least of all your faith.
- In the library
- 12,828 pieces, bundled offline
- Kinds of words
- 20 categories, each 500 deep or more
- Widget surfaces
- 7 iOS families plus Android home
- Accounts required
- 0 no sign-in, tracking or ads
Inside the app
Four minutes of setting up, then it gets out of the way.
The whole app, screen by screen. Use the phone's own tab bar, or pick one from the list.
Today
Religious
When you hold power over someone, hold it the way you would hold water.
Adelante
Original Adelante
Discover
Search a mood, author, or goal
For you
Stoic
We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.
Seneca, Letters to Lucilius
Discipline
A single act is a mood; a repeated act is a character.
Adelante, Original Adelante
Night reflection
Close the ledger. The math looks kinder in the morning.
Adelante, Original Adelante
Favorites
Religious
Remember Me, I will remember you.
The Qur'an, Surah Al-Baqarah 2:152, Pickthall translation
Healing
It mattered. It ended. Both are true.
Adelante, Original Adelante
Night reflection
Unclench your jaw. Nothing is asked of you until dawn.
Adelante, Original Adelante
Widget studio
When you hold power over someone, hold it the way you hold water.
Adelante
Presets
Content
The widget, on your terms
Every choice below is a real one the app gives you.
Nine presets, four surfaces, and the words you asked for. This preview runs on the app's own preset values and on real text from its library, including the rule that stops a long quote ever landing on a small widget.
9:41
We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.
Surface
Preset
Soft IvoryWords
Corner radius22 pt
ShowsAuthor
Length ceiling130 characters
The words
Twenty kinds of words. You decide which ones find you.
This is the Discover screen, working. Type a mood, an author or a goal and it searches the sample library the same way the app does. Or pick a category, and press it again for the next piece.
For you · Stoic
583 pieces in this category
Faith
Held carefully, or not held at all.
Religious content is the part of an app like this that is easiest to get wrong. Adelante treats it as the most sensitive thing it handles, and the rules are enforced by tests rather than by good intentions.
One tradition means one tradition. Choose a faith and no other tradition can reach you. The test suite proves that property, rather than trusting a filter someone remembered to write.
Scripture is never written by this app. Sacred text appears only where a real public-domain translation exists, quoted exactly, with book, chapter and verse. Everything else is clearly labelled as Adelante's own reflection.
Your faith stays on your phone. The choice is stored on-device, never transmitted, never synced, and used for one thing only: deciding what you see.
Skipping it is a first-class answer. Faith is opt-in. Decline, and the other nineteen categories carry the whole app.
Verily in the remembrance of Allah do hearts find rest!
The library
12,828 pieces, and every one of them cleared to be there.
No scraped quote-site filler, and no famous line whose rights nobody checked. The library is original Adelante writing plus genuine public-domain text. No category shipped under 500 pieces, because a shallow category is a repetitive widget.
Hover any category to read something from it.
Bars are scaled to 700, the practical ceiling for a category.
Pieces carry several categories, so these figures overlap. Two are deliberate exceptions: Original Adelante is a small house voice, and Religious is the sum of five separately filled traditions.
Privacy
Nothing about you leaves the phone.
Not a policy written to survive a review, but an architecture with nowhere to send anything. There is no user record to leak, because there is no user record.
No account
Nothing to create, nothing to sign in to, nothing to delete later. Open the app and it already works.
No analytics
No analytics SDK, no advertising SDK, no third-party trackers. Apple's privacy answer is simply "no data collected".
No permissions
No location, camera, microphone, contacts or photos. Adelante asks the system for nothing.
Works offline
The whole library is bundled. The optional content update is anonymous, read-only, and sends none of your choices.
How it's made
One brain, two genuinely native widgets.
A Flutter app holds the state. The surfaces you actually see are written in Swift and Kotlin, because a real WidgetKit view is the only way a widget looks like it belongs on the phone.
iOS · WidgetKit
Fonts inside an extension
A widget extension is a separate bundle, so the app's fonts simply are not there. Worse, asking for them by family name fails silently, which is the hardest kind of bug to see.
FixBundled into the extension target and resolved by exact PostScript name, automated by a project script.
Android · RemoteViews
A typeface you cannot set
RemoteViews has no way to swap a typeface at runtime, so the obvious approach quietly renders every widget in the system default.
FixEach font is its own baked layout variant, chosen by token. The boring pattern instead of the clever, broken one.
Both platforms
Text that never clips
A long reflection on a small widget either overflows or gets cut off, and an ellipsis in the middle of a sentence about patience is its own small insult.
FixEvery piece carries a length tier, and each family only accepts tiers that fit, so a long one is never chosen at all.
The bridge
One source of truth
Two renderers reading two different states is how the card in your hand ends up disagreeing with the widget on your Home Screen.
FixThe app writes one payload into a shared App Group and asks the system to reload. The widget only ever renders what was published.
Rotation
Fresh without a network
Widgets get a strict system refresh budget, so anything that needs a live request to look current will eventually look stale.
FixA pool ships with each refresh and advances on a deterministic time index, with the Lock Screen on its own offset.
Content
A gate, not a vibe
A library this size cannot be curated by reading it. Duplicates, filler and unlicensed lines all get in the moment judgement is the only filter.
FixA deterministic tool de-duplicates, validates schema and licence, and rejects filler. Of the last 9,969 candidates, nine were turned away.
Adelante is Spanish for “go forward.”
It only ever meant one thing. Go forward, today, in the small way that is actually available to you.
In development · running on iOS & Android · close to finished
Hover the A to draw it again