Why Idunia hides the numbers that judge you

By Sarah Lee · 2026-07-29

Idunia is a tracking app. Its whole job is counting things: what you ate, what you trained, how much of what your body needed actually turned up.

So the strangest decision in it is probably this one. There's a mode that stops those counts from turning into a verdict.

We call it Gentle mode. Turn it on and the fueling numbers that read like a verdict go away: fuel percentages, macro grams and targets, shortfalls, energy-availability detail. Check-ins become qualitative.

The numbers that are tools stay. You can still see the water you drank. You can still edit the grams on a food. Anything you export keeps its full numbers.

Why an app like this needs one

Numbers are useful right up until they aren't.

There are days when seeing a figure helps you make a decision, and days when it just becomes something to argue with. Same person, same app, different day. A tracker that only knows how to show you numbers can't tell those days apart, so it shows them either way. On the wrong day that isn't neutral. It's a push in a direction nobody asked for.

Most apps handle this by letting you hide a card or collapse a widget. That never sat right with me, because the number is still sitting there. You know it's there. You can go get it in two taps, and on the day you most want to go get it, you will.

Gentle mode isn't a hidden card. It's the app agreeing to stop scoring your fuel log.

Two modes, and no way to turn the idea off

Here's the part that's a genuine design decision rather than a feature.

Idunia has exactly two modes. Standard and Gentle. There's no third option and no "off."

That sounds small. It isn't. It means every screen we build has to answer the question "what does this look like without fueling numbers that judge?" before it can ship. Gentle mode sits alongside the states every app has to handle anyway: the empty state, the loading state, the error state. It isn't a coat of paint applied at the end. A screen isn't finished until its Gentle version exists.

That constraint has changed the app in ways I didn't expect. When you can't lean on a number to communicate, you have to work out what you were actually trying to say with it. Sometimes the answer is that the number wasn't saying much, and the screen ends up better in Standard mode too.

The notifications were the hard part

Hiding fueling readouts on a screen is straightforward, because you control the screen.

Notifications are different. One gets written ahead of time, fires later, and lands somewhere you don't control, on a lock screen or in a banner stacked with things from other apps. If a nudge is built by dropping a value into a sentence, then sooner or later a number shows up outside the app while Gentle mode is switched on inside it.

So the notification copy isn't built that way. The library those nudges are drawn from has no numbers in it at all, by construction. There's no template with a blank where a figure would go. Which means the leak isn't something anyone has to remember to prevent. It's something the system can't do.

I like fixes shaped like that a lot more than I like fixes that depend on somebody being careful.

What it says about the app generally

Idunia exists to answer one question: are you eating enough for what you're asking your body to do. It was never built to help anyone eat less.

A mode that turns the fuel scorekeeping into words is the clearest way I know to say that inside the product instead of in the marketing. An app built around restriction would never ship one, because the score is the whole point. An app built around adequacy can, because the score was only ever a means to it.

It keeps me honest, too. Every time we consider adding something that only works as a figure on a screen, Gentle mode asks whether it's worth having at all.

That question has killed more ideas than any other rule we've got.