Say how you’re really doing.

“Three check-ins a day” leaves three of what written down nowhere. Here each one has a name — Morning, Before bed, After a scene — and each carries its own instruction, shown while it is being filled in.

The Dominant decides what each one has to collect. A photograph, a mood, an energy level, where you are on the scale of wanting — any of them can be required, and the rest stay available to somebody who wants to say more. Required means the floor, not the form.

Nothing pre-fills itself with a number nobody chose. An untouched slider that quietly recorded a five was the single worst thing this screen ever did: it made “I filled nothing in” indistinguishable from a considered answer, and everything downstream read it as a good day.

A check-in is read and replied to — with words, an emoji, or both. Once it has been answered the entry closes to editing, which is what makes it a record rather than a draft.

But a reply that ends in a question used to arrive somewhere with nowhere to answer it. So any reply can be taken into the chat, with the check-in quoted above the box — dated absolutely, because it will be read hours later by somebody for whom “yesterday” means a different day.

The quote is not part of the draft, so the one thing on screen that is somebody else’s words cannot be reworded before being sent back to them.

Every check-in resolves to a tone — good, rough, or nothing said — and a fortnight of them sits at the top of the screen as a strip of colour. It is the fastest honest answer to “how has this month actually been”, and it is the thing neither of you can reconstruct from memory without flattering it.

A day nobody said anything on is drawn as nothing said, never as a good day. That sounds obvious and was not: an entry naming neither a mood nor an energy used to count as good, on the reasoning that somebody who did not report low energy was not having a low day — which held right up until a check-in could require nothing at all.

After a run of rough days the Dominant gets a quiet heads-up. Not an alarm, and not a number: a note that opens onto the days it is about.

A journal is longer and less structured, and it can be asked for — a prompt to reflect on something specific, which arrives as a notification and files under a heading of its own until it is answered. A cadence can be set too: so many a day, or so many a week, with what is outstanding on the home screen rather than left to be discovered.

Entries can be shared or kept back. What is shared is read and can be responded to; what is not, is not. Neither of you can rewrite the other’s.

The app used to nudge about chores at an hour you picked, and it does not any more — those were the best it could do while it was the only thing that could decide when to speak. Instead you write your own: a line of your wording, an hour, and the days it applies on. Collar on before you leave, 8am, weekdays.

These are the one thing in the app your Dominant cannot read. A nudge you set yourself is not part of the record the way a rule or a ruling is, and a private note-to-self that somebody else reads stops being one.

One last thing, and it is a rule rather than a nicety: welfare data is never frozen. Pause the dynamic and tasks stop, rules stop, enforcement stops — while check-ins and journals stay open, because a pause is often exactly when somebody most needs to say how they are.