Needless Clock
Nine clocks, nine ways to tell
Free · Designed for iPad. Not verified for macOS.
Nine clocks, all telling the same time. A shadow crosses a dial, a brush writes in water, ants carry the digits in. Thirty-one designs — tap a clock to change it.
Nine clocks, all telling the same time. One does it with the sun. One with a brush. One has a colony of ants carry it into place.
What changes from one to the next is the idea of what a clock can be — and two of them will teach you something while you watch.
WORTH LOOKING INTO
Sundial Clock — a gnomon's shadow crosses a paper dial marked in the twelve earthly branches. Tap the paper to move through the twenty-four solar terms and watch the shadow change length. At midsummer noon it is a fifth of the gnomon's height; at midwinter, one and a half times it. Eight times over across one year, and that is how the year used to be read off the ground long before anyone had a clock.
Water Writing Clock — a brush writes the numerals in water on a stone slab, and they start drying the moment they are written, the thin ends closing up first. Seven hands, in the order they were written: oracle bone, bronze, seal script, clerical script, then 王羲之, 顏真卿, 黃庭堅. Tap to change hand and a thousand years of one character goes past — the same numeral, carved, cast, brushed and finally written running.
WHERE THEY COME FROM
Flip Clock — mechanical cards. One of its three is a Solari board, the split-flap that used to hang in airports, and it has to turn its drum through every character on the way.
Clock Wall — a wall of small clock faces whose hands are not telling the time. They are the strokes the digits are drawn with.
Kinetic Array — two dozen pairs of hands on a geared board, turning together into a reading.
Word Clock — a lit glass panel that spells the time out in words.
AND THE REST
Car Park Clock — cars drive in and park to spell out the time. It goes dark when your sky does; turn on location and it uses your own sunset.
Ant Cookie Clock — teams of ants carry bars into place between the digits, with a pair of drops for the colon. Biscuits, rock sugar, dried fish or winter-melon candy.
Worker Clock — couriers walk parcels into position, seen from above, or forklifts carry crates across a warehouse floor.
NINE CLOCKS, THIRTY-ONE DESIGNS
Tap the clock itself to change what it is made of: seven hands for the brush, five walls for the faces, four things for the ants to carry, four colors of glass, three kinds of flap.
SETTINGS
Dim at night — choose the hours and how deep the dimming goes.
Rotate — pick the clocks you want and how often they change, from every minute to every hour, with or without their designs.
Keep the screen on — for a phone or tablet left on a stand.
Use my location — off unless you turn it on, and only ever to work out your sunset.
Header — show or hide the title, date and time zone.
MADE TO BE LEFT RUNNING
It reads from across a room, stays on one clock when you want it to, and follows Reduce Motion. VoiceOver reads the current time on every clock.
No account, no ads, no tracking, no network access. Everything runs on the device, your location included.
iPhone and iPad, iOS 17 or later. Landscape on iPhone, either way up on iPad. Available in 22 languages.
Ratings & Reviews
- This app hasn’t received enough ratings or reviews to display an overview.
The car park works out its own dusk from where the sun actually is, so it darkens when your sky does — early in December, late in June. Turn on the location setting and it follows the sunset where you are. It stays off unless you ask for it, and nothing leaves your device.
The ants' biscuits and rock sugar stand a little off the paper, and a bar being carried casts a lighter shadow than one lying on the ground.
Nine clocks, thirty-one designs.
The developer, 路 林, 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
- 路 林
- Size
- 30.8 MB
- Category
- Utilities
- Compatibility
Requires iOS 17.0 or later.
- iPhone
Requires iOS 17.0 or later. - iPad
Requires iPadOS 17.0 or later. - Mac
Requires macOS 14.0 or later and a Mac with Apple M1 chip or later. - Apple Vision
Requires visionOS 1.0 or later.
- iPhone
- Languages
English and 21 more
- English, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian Bokmål, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Traditional Chinese, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese
- Age Rating
4+
- 4+
- Copyright
- © 2026 Lu Lin