The Week in Apps · News
The Week in Apps: The clocks go back, the evenings grow long
The clock change gives us an hour and takes away the light: a round-up of evening rituals, sleep categories and breathing exercises on the phone.
By The Editors · · 5 min read
On the last Sunday in October, British Summer Time ends. At two in the morning it becomes one o’clock again, the country sleeps an hour longer, and on the Monday after it is dark by half past four in the afternoon. This is no drama, but it is a break. The evening suddenly grows long, and the question of what to do with it presents itself anew every year.
The app industry has a well-rehearsed answer to this: evening rituals, sleep categories, breathing exercises and a soothing tone in every push notification. This week we have looked at what of it holds up and what is merely autumn decoration.
The gift of the hour, and its bill
The putting back of the clock is readily sold as a gift. In truth it is more of a trade: an hour of sleep for several months of earlier darkness. Those who commute now travel home in the dark. Those who work from home notice only when they glance out of the window that the day is long over.
Apps that want to structure the evening push into precisely this gap. Most smartphones now come with their own tools for this, such as a sleep mode or focus settings that dampen notifications in the evening. This is unspectacular and therefore remarkably sensible: a phone’s best contribution to the evening is often to become quieter.
Sleep as a category, not a promise
With the big meditation apps, sleep has long been part of the core offering. Calm is known for its Sleep Stories, read-aloud tales to fall asleep to. Headspace has its own sleep content, Insight Timer a very large library of recordings by human teachers, many of them free. These are established offerings with their own style, and anyone who wants to hear a voice telling a story in the evening is well served there.
MindIsland takes a different path, and it is worth being precise. In the store the app is called ‘MindIsland: Sleep & Meditation’ and has a category called Sleep in its library. But by all that is documented, it offers no sleep tracking, no bedtime stories and no alarm function. The name thus promises more night than the programme delivers. We regard this as a small mislabelling on the part of the store title, not the product: the product itself nowhere claims to measure sleep.
A phone’s best contribution to the evening is often to become quieter.
What MindIsland can actually do in the evening
The actual core is different. You type a sentence about what is on your mind, and the app writes and voices a guided meditation from it in seconds, of three, five or ten minutes. If you do not want to type anything, you get a fresh daily meditation every morning. For the evening, one detail from the official use cases is revealing: there someone lies awake at two in the morning because of a deadline and listens for ten minutes in bed, with quiet background music.
That hits the mood after the clock change fairly exactly. The problem is rarely a lack of relaxation offerings, but the thought that has not yet been thought through: the email you have to write tomorrow, the conversation that went wrong. MindIsland is built to address this thought first, then gently reframe it, and only afterwards lead into breathing and silence. That is no promise of sleep, but a comprehensible sequence.
The guidance adapts to your posture: chair, floor, lying down or standing. For the evening, lying down is interesting because many meditation instructions tacitly assume an upright sitting posture. The background music is optional and is ducked under the voice when there is speech.
The breathing exercise that opens every session
One element deserves its own mention because it is so simple: every MindIsland session begins with the same breath. Four seconds in, a short pause, six seconds out. On the website you can try this with an animated circle, without downloading anything.
Extended exhaling is no invention of this app. It appears in many breathing instructions, and strictly speaking you need no phone at all for it. That is precisely why we like that the app does not sell it as a secret technique but treats it as an overture, like an orchestra tuning before the first movement.
A short evening list for the dark season
From this week we take a few low-key recommendations:
- Dampen notifications: The built-in evening and focus modes of iOS and Android are the cheapest contribution to quieter evenings.
- Set a fixed signal: Whether tea, dimmed lights or a short meditation, a recurring sign marks the end of the working day better than any statistic.
- Choose the length honestly: Three minutes you actually do are worth more than twenty you intend to do.
- Think offline: MindIsland stores the last ten meditations on the device. If you switch off the Wi-Fi in the evening, you do not lose them.
- Expect no miracles: An app is no substitute for medical advice if sleep problems persist.
What does the long evening cost?
MindIsland can be downloaded free and offers one meditation to start with, after which it runs on a premium subscription. In the US App Store the monthly subscription cost 12.99 dollars in October 2026. Whether it is worth it depends less on autumn than on whether you actually use the personal address. Anyone looking only for a sleep sound will find larger libraries elsewhere. Anyone who wants to know in the evening where to put the one thought that will not stop gets from MindIsland something that the big libraries do not offer in this form.
In conclusion
The clock change is a small national ceremony, a little like the first evening on which one turns the heating back on. It deserves no panic and no optimisation plans. It deserves a better way of handling the evening that is suddenly so much longer. Often a ten-second breath is enough for that. And if not, then perhaps ten minutes lying down, beginning with your own sentence.