Bathyal: Spiral Water Clock
Living widget & watch face
Free · In‑App Purchases
Bathyal is a clepsydra — an ancient water clock — rebuilt for the deep sea.
In the bathyal zone there is no day or night. No sunrise, no shadow, nothing to set a clock by. The only light is made by living things. Bathyal is the instrument that keeps time down there: a face of glowing concentric channels where every drop is a second, and time is material.
Watch it work:
• Each second forms as a drop at the heartbeat and joins the ring
• A full ring of seconds distills into one minute — and pours, visibly, down into the next channel
• Minutes pour into hours, hours into the day's two halves, days into months — at midnight the whole cascade runs at once
• Once a year, the last drop of December sinks past the digits into the abyss, unmeasured
Make it yours:
• Solid bands or beaded drops, sweeping or pulsing motion
• 24-hour or 12-hour time — 12-hour splits the hours at the meridian into a morning ring and an afternoon ring
• Calendar rings for the month and year, or a Monday-first week ring whose weeks are spent, not kept
• Run the midnight cascade demo any time from the settings
On your wrist:
• A full-screen water clock for Apple Watch — seconds, minutes, and hours in the same adjacent channels
• Add Bathyal as a complication; the live rings sit on any face and rewrite themselves as the day moves. No two times look the same — that is the instrument, not a hand on a circle
• Hold the Watch face for settings. Pulse or sweep, 12- or 24-hour time, and an optional Monday-first weekday ring. Hours, motion, and the week calendar also travel from the gear on iPhone
On the Lock Screen:
• Add Bathyal as a Lock Screen widget — live rings, a different pattern for every minute, the same figure as the Watch complication
• Hours, motion, and the weekday ring follow from the gear
Quiet by design:
• Completely free, no accounts, no ads, no tracking — it never connects to anything
• Works fully offline
• Keeps the screen awake on a desk or bedside table
If the instrument keeps good time for you, you can send a drop — a small tip — and the face answers with the benefactor tinctures: other colors of bioluminescence, and a single grain of sand set on the seabed of the dial.
Drops become months.
Ratings & Reviews
- This app hasn’t received enough ratings or reviews to display an overview.
• Live Bathyal widgets in every size, including iOS 27's largest, for the Home Screen and StandBy
• Optional seconds on Home Screen and StandBy widgets: press and hold, Edit Widget, Show seconds (iOS 18 and later)
• Widget rings now show the current minute (they ran one minute behind)
• iPhone Duo: half-fold the phone and the clock moves to the upright half
• New grid setting: hide the ring outlines, on iPhone, iPad, Watch and widgets
• Apple Watch: new drops style and a switch to turn off segments
• One grain of sand on the dial's seabed for every tip, piling up toward the date
• Drops: each seconds drop now forms directly above the minute and hour drops
The developer, Stephen Zinn, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy .
Data Not Collected
The developer does not collect any data from this app.
Accessibility
The developer has not yet indicated which accessibility features this app supports. Learn More
Information
- Seller
- Stephen Zinn
- Size
- 4.3 MB
- Category
- Utilities
- Compatibility
Requires iOS 16.0 or later.
- iPhone
Requires iOS 16.0 or later. - iPad
Requires iPadOS 16.0 or later. - Mac
Requires macOS 14.0 or later. - Apple Vision
Requires visionOS 1.0 or later. - Apple Watch
Requires watchOS 10.0 or later.
- iPhone
- Languages
- English
- Age Rating
4+
- 4+
- In-App Purchases
Yes
- Large: A Current $9.99
- Tip Small $1.99
- Drop: The Benefactor's Drop $2.99
- Copyright
- © 2026 Stephen Zinn