Xuranium

Hands Off · picking, biting, pulling.
App page. Not yet on the App Store.

Two photographs of the same hand, taken through the same frame, four weeks apart.

Hands Off is for people who have picked, bitten or pulled since childhood, who hide their hands in photographs and in meetings, and who have already tried gloves, bitter polish, fidget rings and covering the mirror. Logging an episode takes two taps and is free forever. What you pay for is the sequence, the timeline and the arithmetic on your own log.

01The fixed frame

Everyone photographs their hands. Almost nobody can compare the photographs afterwards, because the second one is a different angle at a different distance in different light — which is why progress that is really there is invisible for months. The app fixes the frame: the same guides, for both hands, your scalp, or any area you choose, so the before and the after are actually the same shot.

Empty on purpose
Frame A · day 1
Empty on purpose
Frame B · day 29

Those two plates are the app's frame geometry at its real proportion, and they are empty because there are no photographs of anybody's hands on this website. The timeline is on the phone, is never uploaded anywhere, and leaves the device only if you export it yourself. The five dots under each frame are a severity mark; on this site Blush appears there and nowhere else, because in the app it means "this is an episode" or "this is severity" and nothing may borrow it.

02Your hour

Every episode you log carries where you were, what you were doing and how you felt. After about twelve logs there is enough to answer the question almost nobody works out alone: not when do people do this, but when do you. It is rarely the hour you would have guessed, and it is almost never a round number.

Specimen 31 episodes over five weeks, one bar per hour of the day.

The axis runs 04:00 to 03:00, not midnight to midnight, so the night is not cut in half and the cluster can be seen as one block. The app does the same, for the same reason.

  • In the window 22:00, 23:00 and 00:00 — three shaded hours, each one whole 22 of 3171%
  • Mostly while Scrolling in bed, from the "what were you doing" answer on each log 17 of 22

The shaded window covers three whole hours. Shading half a bar is how a chart ends up disagreeing with the number printed above it, and it is a mistake I have made in this portfolio and had to go back and fix.

When your own window opens, the app reminds you of the replacement behaviour you chose in advance, by name. Not a motivational quote, not a notification that says you have got this.

03The 21 days

The paid part is a 21-day habit-reversal sequence in three-minute daily steps: awareness training first, then a competing response you pick yourself, then stimulus control. It is a programme, not treatment, and there is no chatbot anywhere in it. Each day is a page and a decision, and it waits for you rather than nagging.

One more thing it does not do: a slip does not delete your progress. The app keeps two numbers side by side — your current run and your best run — and your best run is kept for good. Alongside them sits your episode count for the last seven days and the direction it is heading, which is the number that actually tells you whether this is working.

Best run Kept permanently. A slip does not reset it, and nothing on screen calls it a relapse. 29days
Last 7 days 3 episodes, against 9 in the seven days before −6

The word "episode" is used throughout the app and on this page. "Relapse" imports a disease frame and a verdict; an episode is a countable event, which is exactly what the log records.

04Free and paid
  • Free, permanently The two-tap episode log, the streak and best run, the widget, one timeline photo a week $0.00
  • Programme + Photos The 21-day sequence, the full fixed-frame timeline and its comparison slider, the trigger analytics $34.99 / yr$4.99 / mo

A 7-day free trial, then one price billed once a year. The longest-established app in this category charges by the week, and at the time I checked the weekly figure worked out at $65 — which is the single most common reason people in these communities say they gave up on apps entirely. There is no weekly plan here and there will not be one.

Verify the price in the App Store before you believe it, including mine. Apple sets the figure in your country.

05What it will not do
It is not therapy and not medical advice
It is tracking, education and accountability. It does not diagnose anything and it does not name a condition for you. If you want a clinician, this app is not a substitute for one and does not pretend to be one.
It will not photograph a wound
Nothing clinical, no wound photography, no red, nothing that looks like a medical product. Your own timeline is yours and the app never shows it to anyone, including me.
It will not tell you off
No shaming, no verdicts about you as a person, no "you lost your streak". The app narrates the behaviour and leaves you out of it.
It will not send your photographs anywhere
No account, no login, no server, no cloud gallery. The timeline is on your iPhone and in your own iCloud, which is yours.