BenZai
One app. One family. Nobody else.
What's for dinner and whose turn it is to cook. What's missing from the cupboard. Whose job the bins are. The money you're putting by, the language you're learning, the game you're losing. And a chat where nobody has to share a language.
iPhone: open in Safari → Share → Add to Home Screen.
What's inside
Not a launcher full of half-finished tabs. Each of these is the thing you would have downloaded on its own — and they know about each other, which is the part a folder full of apps can never do.
Seven days with a name against each meal — whose turn it is. When the day arrives it asks whether you cooked it, and if you didn't, what happened instead.
Sunday's suggestions are written from those answers. Skip three weeknights for being too long, and next week's weeknights are shorter.
Tonight's dinner, the messages you haven't read, the move you owe somebody, the bins. It shows what's waiting and nothing else — so when it's empty, that means something.
Agree the week and every dish gets its recipe, then the cupboards are counted against it. What's missing is one tap onto the list — and everyone else is told the moment it lands, because that changes what they buy on the way home. Tick it off and it walks itself into the cupboard.
Habits as five weeks of squares, not a number. Savings pots that keep every amount in and out — so you can see who has actually put in what.
Twenty rungs from gentle to genuinely hard, and you can't skip one. Challenge someone and agree best-of-three first, so everybody knows when it's over.
Chores with a name and a date, or neither — whoever, sometime is a real answer. They come back on their own and rotate unless somebody claims one.
Ten minutes a day, written for you. Say the words aloud and it scores you. Twi and Yorùbá too — not only the languages the big apps bother with.
Somewhere to go, worked out from what you liked last time and what you can spend. Then the days planned once you've chosen.
And the one nobody else does
Every other app makes a family pick one. Somebody always loses — usually the oldest person in the room, who then stops writing. Here, each person sets the language they read in, once. That's the end of it.
Not a transcript. She speaks in Twi; it's heard, translated, and said aloud in French. Somebody who can't read is not helped by a translation they can only look at.
Twi, Ewe, Ga, Yorùbá and Hausa beside English, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, German and Arabic. The Ghanaian ones go through Khaya, built in Accra by people who speak them.
Good evening is Maadwo — not a translation of two words. When a machine gets something wrong, somebody who speaks it corrects it once and it's right for everyone, forever.
Calls
Voice and video, straight between the two phones. A full-screen ring that wakes the handset, a caller who can see it's ringing, and a line in the conversation afterwards if nobody picked up.
What it isn't
No algorithm, because there's nothing to rank — the only people in here were invited by name. No advertising, no suggested friends, nobody measuring how long you stayed.
One thing to be straight about: messages are translated on the way out, so the server has to read them to do it. This is a family app built on trust between the people in it. That's the trade, and you should know it before you pick it.
iPhone: open in Safari → Share → Add to Home Screen. It behaves like any other app after that.
