There's a FOSS alternative called Drip.
It is funded by Mozilla and Open Knowledge Foundation. Available on iOS and Android.
Mensinator is also another FOSS that uses no third party sdks and is reproducibly built for android, fairly actively used, and made by women. https://github.com/EmmaTellblom/Mensinator
As I had failed finding an app that was not ad-ridden or oldish, my girlfriend and I are using this (I am copying her values, to know when her period will be). Also contributing some code :)
Can I ask why you use it? We used test strips - they're really cheap and way more accurate as women's bodies aren't clocks. That was effective for getting pregnant.
Using anything except some kind of active measures to avoid pregnancy doesn't pass my engineer brain and certainly doesn't pass my wife's Pharmacologist brain (i.e. she actually knows what she's talking about whereas I'm using applied probability theory with assumptions).
For the opposite FYI; some aren't trying to either target or not target pregnancy, they want to have a forecast for the next 3 days so they can pack their purse.
Can I ask why you use it?
Honestly just for fun? I think girl stuff is cool and my partner indulges me. It does truly help with emotional/sexual/physical planning, but a very biological embodied flavor of fun is my real reason.
FYI - many couples track cycles because they are trying to get pregnant.
Yes but as I said in my post - it's not effective. Hormone measuring strips are and they costs very little - $2 / month - and are very effective. We wouldn't have three kids now if we relied on counting days.
You use them in conjunction with each other. For instance, if one of you travels for work, you can try to plan around when you think the next cycle will be.
A strip confirming you’re ovulating is pretty useless by itself if your partner is on the other side of the country.
this article got me wondering where the partner app, potentially named drop?, that warns drip user's partners to be more careful in their choice of words, or lack thereof, during that special time where domestic emotions often devolve in to an irrational mess ending with a few days of sleeping on the couch until the drip has subsided
I never noticed any "special times" of irrationality with my partner. I have noticed I got the cold shoulder when I behaved like a teenage boy or didn't treat her with the respect an adult human deserves.
I've never known my partners to turn into an irrational mess because I said something they would otherwise be fine with. I actually find partners to be quite a bit more affectionate around those times. There's certainly an element of emotional volatility, but it swings both ways... And doesn't devolve into messes at all. Nothing that can't be sorted with a simple 'how are you feeling, anything I can do to help?'
I’m not sure why this is downvoted, the strips are indeed a lot more accurate.
It's because people are reading the first few words and thinking "this is an male nerd asking stupid ignorant questions".
It's that or there are people who actually think that counting days is a good way to enable unprotected sex without a risk of baby. Which is absolutely isn't - it changes the risk to 2-5% a shot. Compared to around ~2% year for condoms alone.
It's worth pointing out that due to the nature of how contraceptive studies are done, it's remarkably easy to stay out of that 2% for condoms. (Namely, if you're planning on using condoms as your choice of contraceptive, actually use the condoms).
They can burst and slip off too. That's the problem. I'm anti-abortion* so we took extra measures to avoid the argument (my wife is Pro, and I although have no right to tell anyone else what to do with their body, it would probably have ended our relationship had she done it).
* For myself, I find that the Americans who try to force everyone else to follow their personal positions to be insane Authoritarian Fascists. Our society only works if people have freedom and personal choice.
> Mozilla
So they will end up killing it soon? /s
This gets downvoted for being negative, but it was my immediate reaction when I saw "Mozilla": They're axing projects that don't align for strategic reasons that probably make sense, but is simultaneously very Googly.
Association with Mozilla is a cause for concern when considering the longevity of a project.
Sure, Mozilla does this. So does Google. And Apple. And Microsoft. Everyone does. Pruning is a healthy and expected part of running a business. So what? All software is temporary, given a long enough timeline, even gmail. It's a user's fault for expecting otherwise.
> Mozilla does this. So does Google. And Apple. And Microsoft.
Those are all companies you need to be wary with, because a strategic choice on their behalf may upend your life with a few days warning, or none at all.
And the sad part is that Mozilla joined their ranks, not qualifying as a truly “public service company”.
> All software is temporary, given a long enough timeline
Sure, we must all perish one day. But what you describe is how commercial SaaSS gets pruned because it’s good for business, and I have two objections with that:
1. That doesn’t make it good for users.
2. It’s a different timeline for software than for services.
I was contacted today by the customer of an old employer post bankruptcy. They want to know how to deal with self-hosting the service their hardware depends on; this never got delivered. All software is temporary, I told him, meanwhile his very expensive hardware wouldn’t initialize properly on boot.
Some companies kill projects much more frequently than others.
https://killedbygoogle.com/ vs https://killedbymozilla.com/
Yet Mozilla has the stigma here?
I suspect that this could be due to “immediacy effect” or “availability heuristic”. Mozilla’s announcement that they are shutting down Pocket and Fakespot was only three weeks ago and was big news. On the other hand, Google shut down so many services that it’s not a rare or memorable issue – unless you were personally impacted by the shutdown.
Mozilla launches fewer projects in general, so the denominator is smaller.
But yes, Google is the worst at this, and they've built up a reputation which has really hurt them! For example, basically no one believed that Stadia would stick around long-term, which (I would argue) became a self-fulfilling prophesy.
There’s “move fast and break things” at Facebook.
And then there’s “launch whatever an SVP dreams up” followed by “kill that old SVP’s thing” at Google.
Perhaps slightly exaggerated. Google product reveals and sunsets have frequently followed executive movements in/around/out of the company. Two big examples that had widespread impact are in the later Google Wallet/Pay changes and some of the later insanity around multiple self-canabalizing IM/chat/conferencing services.
There seems to be no long term vision or strategy at Google, and Pichai is notoriously averse to making decisions of consequence. It’s not surprising that Google is rudderless.
Spot on with Stadia! I use GeForce NOW, now, but it's nowhere near as stable or fast as Stadia. Very sad.
If Google had launched it and told everyone from the start that if they canceled it you'd get your money for games/hardware back I think people would've tried it.