The iceberg model, applied to a person

One layer shows. Seven do the work.

Waterline draws your life as an iceberg. Skills and visible results sit above the water — the part anyone can see. Under it sit the conditions you started from, the structure you run on, the arena you compete in, the timing, the information reaching you, and what keeps you moving. You describe each one by picking a tier. What comes back is a picture, not a verdict.

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iPhone · free · no account, no ads, and it never opens a connection

8layers
1above the water
0accounts
0network requests

What the app actually does

It draws the whole iceberg, not the tip

The screen you open onto is a stack of eight bands. At the top, above a drawn water surface, is skills and tools — the layer other people can actually observe. Below it, in order: what keeps you moving, the career arena you are competing inside, the information reaching you, timing and cycles, the tier of the game you are playing, the inner structure you run on, and at the bottom the base conditions you did not choose. The proportions are the argument. You look at it and the visible part is obviously small.

You pick a tier, you do not score yourself

Every factor inside a layer offers five named tiers, and you tap the one that reads truest. The tiers are written as descriptions of a situation — sentences you either recognise or do not — rather than as one-to-five stars. This matters more than it sounds: asked to put a number on your own family background or your own drive, most people either flatter themselves or punish themselves. Asked which of five sentences sounds like their life, most people just answer.

A sandbox for "what if that were different"

The What If tab gives you a copy of your own picture that you can push around freely. Raise the information layer, drop the timing layer, imagine a different arena, and watch how the shape changes. Nothing you do there is written back — it is a scratch copy that disappears when you leave. It is the difference between wondering whether a change would matter and seeing which layer the whole shape is actually resting on.

A number, and an honest account of what it is

The app does compute one number from your answers, and it names a band for it. We are not going to pretend otherwise or hide it in the corner. What it is: a weighted average of the tiers you yourself picked today, with a deliberate pull toward your thinnest layer. What it is not: a measurement, a diagnosis, or a rank against other people — the app holds no one else’s data and never asks for any, so there is nothing to rank you against. The comment sitting next to that code says the bands describe a situation, not a person’s worth. This site says the same.

Potential, spent on structure rather than on points

Small daily check-ins accumulate potential. Potential is not the score — you cannot check in your way to a higher number. What it buys is a lever: enough of it raises one whole layer by a tier, which is the app quietly arguing that structure moves before results do. The base-conditions layer cannot be levered at all, ever, by design. Nobody gets to renegotiate where they started, and an app that let you pretend otherwise would be lying to you.

It remembers, so you can see drift instead of mood

A snapshot is kept the first time the picture changes on any given day, and a light daily trace is kept for a few months and drawn as a line. Any single day’s answers are contaminated by that day — you fill it in after a bad meeting and the whole thing tilts. A line across months is the only way to tell a real shift from a Tuesday. When a chapter of your life ends, archiving the season files the whole record away and starts a clean one, without deleting what came before.

A read-back written on the phone

Ask, and the app writes back a short account of what it sees in the picture: which layer is thinnest, what that layer tends to constrain, and one thing that is usually reachable from where the rest of the picture sits. It is produced by rules running on your phone, from your own answers. It is not a therapist, not a coach, and not a language model somewhere else — nothing is sent anywhere, because the app has no way to send anything anywhere.

Yours to take out again

Everything can be exported as a single JSON file through the standard iOS share sheet, and you can produce a poster image of the iceberg if you want to keep it or send it to someone. Nothing is exported unless you tap the button. If you want a nudge, there is one optional reminder in the evening, generated locally; if you do not, it stays off and the app never contacts you.

How to fill it in the first time

It takes one sitting. The order is deliberate: the app asks about the bottom of the iceberg first, and works upward, because answering about your skills before answering about your conditions tends to colour everything underneath.

Start at the bottom, with what you did not chooseThe first layer is base conditions — where and when you started, and what came with that. It is the one layer nothing in the app can raise. Answering it first sets the frame honestly: some of the picture was decided before you had an opinion about it.
Work up through structure, arena and timingThen the structure you run on, the tier of the game you are in, the timing of what you are doing, the information actually reaching you, and the career arena and its rules. Each is a handful of factors, each factor five tiers. Pick the sentence that sounds like your life, not the one you would like to be true and not the one that feels appropriately humble.
Finish with skills and tools, at the topThe visible layer comes last, on purpose. By the time you reach it you have already described seven layers underneath, so it is harder to mistake your skill level for the whole story. This is also the only layer where you can add a factor of your own if the shipped ones miss something about your work.
Look at the shape before you look at the numberThe useful information is the silhouette: which bands are thin, whether the thin ones are near the bottom or near the top, and whether one layer is holding the rest down. The number is a summary of that shape and is strictly less informative than the shape itself.
Come back when something actually changesNot daily. The picture is made of things that move over seasons — a job, a city, a relationship, what you have learnt to do. Re-answering every morning mostly measures your mood. Re-answering when something has genuinely shifted is what makes the trend line mean anything.

One thing to hold on to while you do this: the picture is a description of how you see your situation today, and it will read differently in three months without anything about you having changed. That is not a flaw in the exercise. That is what a self-description is.

What leaves your phone

Nothing. Not a summary, not an anonymous identifier, not a crash report. The app source contains no network call at all — no fetch, no HTTP client, no SDK making one on its behalf.

There is no account and no sign-in, and there is no screen where one could be created. You open the app and it is already yours. Nothing is keyed to an email address because no email address is ever asked for.

Your answers, your history and your settings live in a small local database on the device and are deleted with the app. There is no server holding a copy, which also means: if you delete the app without exporting first, it is gone. That is the honest cost of not having a backend.

No analytics SDK, no advertising SDK, no attribution SDK, no crash telemetry. Nobody, including us, can see how many layers you filled in or what you answered.

Exporting and poster-sharing both go through the standard iOS share sheet, so what you send goes exactly where you send it and nowhere else.

Price

Free. There is no in-app purchase, no subscription, no paid tier, no ad and no locked layer. Every theme, every language and every screen is there from the first launch.

Nothing is funded by your attention or your data, because there is neither an advertiser nor a server in the picture. If that ever changes, it will be a purchase you make on purpose — the thing that will not change is that your answers stay on your phone.

Download on the App Store

Questions people ask first

Is this a personality test or a psychological assessment?

No, and it is worth being blunt about it. There is no instrument behind it, no validation study, no norms, no clinical meaning. It is a structured way of writing down how you see your own situation, drawn as a picture. If you want an assessment, that is a different kind of thing and a professional does it.

Why does it show a score if the score is not a measurement?

Because a number is a compact handle for a shape, and it makes a trend line drawable. It is an average of the tiers you picked, weighted, with extra pull from your thinnest layer. It has no external referent at all. Read it as a label on today’s picture, and read the picture for anything that matters.

Am I being compared to other users?

You cannot be. The app never sends anything anywhere and never receives anything, so it does not have another person’s answers to compare you with. The named bands are fixed thresholds written into the app, not percentiles.

Do I need an account or an internet connection?

Neither. There is no sign-in screen and no network code. It works the same in airplane mode on the first launch as on the hundredth.

What if the picture comes out looking bleak?

Then it is telling you where the constraint is, which is more useful than a flattering picture. The app has no target you are failing to hit, and no layer it wants you to raise. If reading it makes things worse rather than clearer, close it — a self-description is not an obligation, and it is not a measure of you.

Can I get my data out?

Yes, as one JSON file through the share sheet, at any time, with everything in it. There is no export tier and no export limit.