Mushroom
A private, on-device desktop pet for your Mac that gently nudges you to stay hydrated, move, and focus
Week 5 · Aug 10 – 16, 2026Product
About
Mushroom is a tiny pixel companion who sits on your desktop and watches the clock so you do not have to. It nudges you at the right moments: water, breaks based on how long you have actually been active rather than a dumb timer, snacks, the 20-20-20 rule for your eyes, and a wind down at bedtime. Ignore a nudge and nothing bad happens. Your mushroom droops a little, one click cheers it right back up, and a streak you break costs you nothing. No guilt, no alarms, no dashboard telling you off. Talk to it in plain words. Click the pet and type "remind me in 2 hours to call Tom" or "focus for 45 minutes on the proposal", and it just happens. Chat runs on Apple Intelligence, entirely on your Mac. It does more than nudge. Reminders you can edit and pause, focus sessions with a countdown, streaks and stats, a notepad, read aloud, the weather, a daily news digest from your own feeds, photo memories, people to call, two little games for a proper break, and tool plugins that teach it a new trick from one small JSON file. Send things to people. Drop a file on your mushroom and it hands you back a link that works for 24 hours, with nothing to install at the other end. Give one person an 8 character invite code and your two mushrooms carry messages between you. Private by default. Your conversations run on Apple's on-device model and never leave your Mac. There is no Mushroom account and no analytics. Two things can ever leave your Mac, file sharing and messages to a friend, and both arrive switched off. Optional iCloud sync keeps your own Macs in step through your own private iCloud, never through us. Anything that goes online says in plain words what it sends and where, and stays off for good if that is what you want. Small and well-behaved. Lives in your menu bar with no Dock icon. And there's more...
