One person, a jar of sand

Dunarium is made by one person: Dmitrii Kargashin, an independent app developer. It's published by his one-person company, Cardamon Inc, so there's no studio and no team behind the name. The physics, the sound, the art, the store listings, and this website are all built by one person, who wanted the moving-sand-art toy to exist on a phone and made it himself.

That means the person who wrote the tilt-gravity simulation is the same one who answers you on the support page. It's a small thing made with care, and I'd rather keep it that way than chase growth.

The moving sand art frames people keep on their desks are lovely, and completely fixed: you flip the glass, the sand falls the one way gravity allows, and that's it. A phone has a real accelerometer in it. It seemed a shame not to let you tilt the sand yourself: lift one edge and watch the grains slide that way, in real time.

So Dunarium started as a simple question. What if the sand moved with how you held the phone? Everything after that (the gel, the rising bubbles, the ASMR sound, the glass shapes) grew out of chasing that one feeling.

Under the glass, every grain is simulated as you watch. Your phone's accelerometer and gyroscope feed a real-time gravity field, and the sand, gel, and air bubbles respond to it frame by frame. The motion is computed from how you move the phone, moment to moment. The soundscape works the same way: the ticks, bloops, and churns you hear come from what the sand is doing right then.

Building that to run smoothly on a phone, quietly and offline, took a long time to get right. It's the part I'm proudest of. The whole simulation runs on your device, which is why it keeps working with no connection at all.

The app is built around a few lines I won't cross:

• No ads. There are no ads between scenes, on exit, or anywhere else. Ads are the single most common complaint in this corner of the store, and a calm toy with an ad in it isn't calm.
• No account. There's nothing to sign up for; you open it and play.
• Your camera and sensor data stay on the device. The tilt and motion readings, and any camera frames the toy uses, don't leave your phone.
• One-time unlock. The toy is free to play. If you want everything unlocked, it's a single $4.99 purchase, and nothing keeps charging you afterward.

Dunarium is a toy. It makes no wellness or health claims; it's meant to be a nice thing to hold.

Dunarium is available on iPhone and Android. The support page covers the common questions, and the press kit has the fact sheet and assets for anyone writing about it.

Download Dunarium for iPhone and iPad from the App Store, or download it for Android from Google Play.