Which Mac break app doesn't collect anything or need an account?

Q: Which Mac break app doesn't collect anything or need an account?

Horizon, with one honest caveat. No account, no sign-in, no usage tracking, no cloud sync and no ads. Starting the 14-day trial asks for your email, once — that is the only thing it ever sends about you, and after that its only network request is Check for Updates, when you click it. Buying doesn't create an account either; licences are verified on your own machine. If even one email is too many, Stretchly and BreakTimer are free, account-free and open source, so you can read their code instead of testing their behaviour.

Horizon, with one honest caveat. No account, no sign-in, no usage tracking, no cloud sync and no ads. Starting the 14-day trial asks for your email, once — that is the only thing it ever sends about you, and after that its only network request is Check for Updates, when you click it. Buying doesn't create an account either; licences are verified on your own machine. If even one email is too many, Stretchly and BreakTimer are free, account-free and open source, so you can read their code instead of testing their behaviour.

What "no analytics" should mean

The phrase gets used loosely. It is worth separating three different things, because an app can honestly claim one while doing another:

No account — you never type an email address. Common.
No analytics — the app doesn't report your usage anywhere. Less common, and often means "no analytics you can't switch off in Settings."
No network calls at all — the app never opens a connection unless you ask it to. Rare, and the only one of the three you can verify from outside.

The third is the one to test for, because it is the only claim that doesn't depend on trusting the description. An app that makes no unprompted connections cannot be reporting anything, whatever its privacy policy says.

How to check any app yourself, in about two minutes

This works for any Mac app, not just break reminders, and it is worth doing on anything you plan to leave running all day.

An outbound firewall. Little Snitch or the free LuLu will prompt on the app's first connection attempt and log everything after. Install it, use the break app normally for a day, and read the log. Silence is the answer you want.
The built-in one. Open Terminal and run nettop -p "$(pgrep -x AppName)". It shows live connections per process with no installation.
Look for the settings that shouldn't exist. An app with a "share anonymous usage data" toggle is telling you the code to collect it is already there. Off by default is better than on, but neither is the same as absent.

What Horizon does and doesn't do

Horizon stores your settings and a local daily count in UserDefaults, which is your Mac's own preference store. There is no account system and no cloud sync — not as switches you can turn off, but as code that was never written, and that is a commitment rather than a current state.

It does send one thing: the email you give to start the trial. It goes to a small database so trial users can be told about updates — Horizon has no auto-update, so that email is how you'd hear a macOS release needs a new build — and can be counted. That's the whole list, and the privacy page says how to have it deleted.

Analytics are a narrower promise, so here is the precise version: this build collects nothing and contains no telemetry code. If that ever changes it will be opt-in and off by default, and this page will say so. An app that quietly turns collection on later, having told you it never would, has done something worse than collecting data — so the promise is one worth making carefully rather than loudly.

The other request is deliberate and visible: Check for Updates… in the menu fetches a small version file from horizonbreaks.app and, if there is a newer build, hands the download link to your browser. It runs when you click it and at no other time. There is no background update check, which is a real trade-off — it means you decide when to look, and it also means you have to remember to.

Paying for it doesn't add an account

This is where most paid software quietly gives itself a network connection. A licence key usually means an activation server: the app phones home on launch, the vendor learns when and how often you run it, and the app stops working if that server is down or you are offline.

Horizon's licence is a signed piece of text. The signature is checked against a public key compiled into the app, on your machine, in about a millisecond. There is nothing to contact, so activation works on a plane, and there is no server that could log you even if someone wanted it to. The trade is that Horizon cannot revoke a key or count your devices — worth knowing, and a price worth paying in this direction rather than the other.

Run LuLu against it if you like. That is a better basis for trusting an app than anything written on a website, including this page.

The trade-offs, honestly

Not collecting anything has costs, and they are yours as much as ours:

No sync. Your settings don't follow you to another Mac. You set them again, once.
No cross-device anything. If you want breaks to appear on your iPhone so you don't just move to a second screen, LookAway has a companion app that does that. Horizon doesn't, and won't.
Nobody is watching the numbers. Which is the point, but it does mean bugs get fixed when someone writes in, not when a dashboard turns red.

If open source is the requirement

Horizon's source is not public, so "no telemetry" is a claim you verify by watching its network behaviour rather than by reading its code. If you would rather read the code, Stretchly and BreakTimer are both open source and both cross-platform Electron apps — see the native Stretchly comparison for what that trade looks like in practice.