The Breathe app on Apple Watch is a great way to bring just a bit of mindfulness into your day, but it’s far from the only breathing app on the market. Now, a new app in town could change how you perform this simple activity. Enter Lungy.
Lungy describes itself as a “next-generation” breathing app. And it has some cool tricks up its sleeve that make it a truly unique experience on your iPhone.
Here’s what you should know about Lungy, how it compares to Apple’s Breathe app, and why you might want it choose it over other breathwork apps out there.
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What is Lungy?
Lungy was conceived and coded by Luke Hale, a doctor and multidisciplinary creative. It combines Hale’s deep experience in medicine, design, and app development to create a new take on mindfulness.
Many breathing apps guide you through a practice and instruct you to close your eyes like a meditation. Lungy doesn’t. This app is unique because it responds in real-time to your breathing.
Instead, Lungy uses beautifully designed user interfaces like dandelions dispersing off a flower or small digital particles blowing around in a box. These aren’t just random animations — each “scene” specifically corresponds to your breath.
Lungy does this by using the microphone on your iPhone to detect when you’re breathing out.
In an interview with the creativity and design website, It’s Nice That, Hale says that this type of interactive breathing helps users feel that each breath is “powerful” and can influence “the world positively.”
Instead of a standard instructor-led breathing session, Lungy aims to give intelligent feedback on a user’s breathing. Hale says that this means the app is much more of a two-way street than other breathing apps.
Even the way it measures breathing is intuitive. Instead of measuring how much you’ve breathed using milliliters or other measurements, the app tracks your breathing through everyday objects like fruit or animals.
Using the Lungy app for breathing exercises
When you first open the Lungy app, you’ll be prompted to grant both microphone and camera access. The microphone is used as a core functionality to detect your breath, while the camera is used to ensure that you are close enough to the iPhone’s display for it to pick up your breathing.
The app notes that it never records or shares your microphone and camera data.
From there, Lungy guides you through a simple tutorial. The first practice is to breathe on your iPhone’s microphone. The second involves filling up a “bar” by extending your exhale.
Once you finish the tutorial, you’re free to use Lungy. The main home screen tracks how many days and breaths you’ve completed and gives you quick access to a short “daily exercise.”
There are four other tabs here. In the “Exercises” tab, you can manually select from four different exercise categories, including Recharge, Relaxation, Sleep, and Sports.
In each of these categories, there are specific breathing practices. For example, the Recharge category includes “rectangle breaths,” which are slow and relaxing. In the Relaxation category, you’ll find “box breaths,” a Navy SEAL breathing practice based on Yoga Pranayama.
Do note that only a few breathing practices are free, while others require a monthly subscription fee. Lungy is affordable, however. It only costs $4.49 per month or $16.99 annually (a much better deal than monthly.)
You can also track your progress in the Progress tab and change some simple settings in the Settings tab.
Overall, Lungy feels relatively barebones and simple compared to other health and wellness apps. However, it feels intentionally designed that way. The art style is also fun and vaguely nostalgic compared to the clean, sterile design of some other apps on the market.
How does Lungy compare to Apple’s Breathe app?
Comparing the Lungy app to Breathe is comparing apples and oranges. For one, Breathe is watchOS-based, while Lungy is iPhone-based.
This means that Breathe might come in handy when you want to be more discreet with your breathing. You won’t have to hold your iPhone in front of your face.
Both apps also set out to do different things. Breathe is more of a meditation app that guides you through a barebones mindfulness practice with haptic feedback on your wrist. Lungy is an app that aims to help you connect with your breathing through clever interactivity.
Lungy is also more feature-rich. Breathe only has one breath practice, while Lungy has several. The interactivity and visual appeal of Lungy are also two draws that Breathe doesn’t have.
In a nutshell, however, both of these apps will help you become more mindful and practice better breathing.
How does Lungy compare to other breathwork and breathing apps?
Lungy is a breathing app that’s pretty barebones and simple. That is part of its appeal, but it can be both a strength and a weakness compared to other breathing or breathwork apps.
For example, Lungy only has a few different breathing practices available currently. Each one is effective and a delight to use, but if you’re in the market for variety, you may quickly get bored of Lungy’s practices.
You can find a wider array of breathing practices on breathwork-specific apps like Breathwrk or on yoga and meditation apps like Open. Generally, these apps feature instructor-led sessions with no interactivity.
On the flip side, you may be able to learn many more different types of breathing practices that you can take into your daily life.
Lungy’s interactive nature makes it stand out among breathing apps, however. There’s really nothing else like it on the market, which is reason enough to give it a try.
In either case, Lungy is completely free to use, so there’s no downside to trying it out and seeing if it fits your needs and circumstances.
Breathing has benefits — and Lungy is one way to do it
According to Healthline, breathing practices are associated with a number of mental and physical benefits, including lowered stress response and improved lung function. In other words, it’s a good idea to bring some breathing practices into your life.
Lungy is far from the only breathing app on the market, but it is a solid choice for many people for a reason.
It’s intuitive, simple to use, and doesn’t complicate anything with fancy features. Its main draw, however, is its interactivity — something that’s missing from basically every other app on the market.
If you’re new to the practice of breathwork or breath mindfulness, then Lungy is going to be a great way to get a start. It’s simple and unintimidating, and its interactivity lets you connect with your breath in a truly unique way.
But even if you’re an experienced breathwork practitioner or you use the Breathe app daily, Lungy is still worth a try. It’s well-designed and creative enough to warrant a slot on your iPhone.
